On the edge of the north west continental shelf, far from the Western Australian mainland, lie a series of remote coral reef systems that rise steeply from deep water to almost touch the ocean’s surface.
AIMS has been studying the Scott Reef, Ashmore Reef and Rowley Shoals systems for over 20 years, providing valuable knowledge about their plants and animals. To improve understanding of the entire region’s health over time, a coordinated approach to standardised mapping, monitoring and assessment was conducted.
The North West Shoals to Shore program forged new paths in underwater monitoring by comparing traditional diver-based methods with autonomous methods, including independent machines capable of collecting data across large areas of ocean and others that can process information very quickly. These new cost-effective technologies could shape a new age of reef monitoring across the region.
While developing these innovative techniques, the project contributed to the regional understanding by filling in the gaps in knowledge and creating reliable maps of important seabed communities of the north west shelf. Part of this work included fish and shark surveys to understand their patterns of movement and population sizes.
The team mapped the physical features of the seabed as well as water properties and movement in the area to understand how the seabed and ocean help shape these marine communities.
The results of this project are available in the North West Atlas, a website and mapping system that provides environmental research data in a publicly available and easily an accessible form.
Publications
Birt, Matthew & Cure, Katherine & Wilson, Shaun & Newman, Stephen & Harvey, Euan & Meekan, Mark & Speed, Conrad & Heyward, Andrew & Goetze, Jordan & Gilmour, James. (2021). Isolated reefs support stable fish communities with high abundances of regionally fished species. Ecology and Evolution. 11. 1-18. 10.1002/ece3.7370.
Thomas, L., Underwood, J.N., Adam, A.A.S. et al. Contrasting patterns of genetic connectivity in brooding and spawning corals across a remote atoll system in northwest Australia. Coral Reefs 39, 55–60 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-019-01884-8
Dugal, Laurence & Thomas, Luke & Wilkinson, Shaun & Z.T., Richards & Alexander, Jason & Adam, Arne & Kennington, W. & Jarman, Simon & Ryan, Nicole & Bunce, Michael & Gilmour, James. (2021). Coral monitoring in northwest Australia with environmental DNA metabarcoding using a curated reference database for optimized detection. Environmental DNA. 4. 10.1002/edn3.199.
Gilmour, James & Cook, Kylie & Ryan, Nicole & Puotinen, Marjetta & Green, Rebecca & Heyward, Andrew. (2021). A tale of two reef systems: Local conditions, disturbances, coral life histories, and the climate catastrophe. Ecological Applications. 32. 10.1002/eap.2509.
Cresswell AK, Ryan NM, Heyward AJ, Smith ANH, Colquhoun J, Case M, Birt MJ, Chinkin M, Wyatt M, Radford B, Costello P, Gilmour JP. 2021. A quantitative comparison of towed-camera and diver-camera transects for monitoring coral reefs. PeerJ 9:e11090 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.11090
Thomas, Luke & Underwood, Jim & Rose, Noah & Fuller, Zachary & Z.T., Richards & Dugal, Laurence & Grimaldi, Camille & Cooke, Ira & Palumbi, Stephen & Gilmour, James. (2022). Spatially varying selection between habitats drives physiological shifts and local adaptation in a broadcast spawning coral on a remote atoll in Western Australia. Science advances. 8. eabl9185. 10.1126/sciadv.abl9185.
Grimaldi, C. M., Lowe, R. J., Benthuysen, J. A., Green, R. H., Reyns, J., Kernkamp, H., & Gilmour, J. (2022). Wave and tidally driven flow dynamics within a coral reef atoll off northwestern Australia. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 127, e2021JC017583.
Wyatt, Mathew & Radford, Ben & Callow, Nikolaus & Bennamoun, Mohammed & Hickey, Sharyn. (2022). Using ensemble methods to improve the robustness of deep learning for image classification in marine environments. Methods in Ecology and Evolution. 10.1111/2041-210X.13841.
Adam AAS, Thomas L, Underwood J, Gilmour J, Richards ZT. Population connectivity and genetic offset in the spawning coral Acropora digitifera in Western Australia. Mol Ecol. 2022 Jul;31(13):3533-3547. doi: 10.1111/mec.16498. Epub 2022 Jun 5. PMID: 35567512.
