Ningaloo Marine Park (NMP) is a remote coastal reef strip of 300km covering approximately 170,000ha. Already iconic to the people of Western Australia, the NMP has recently been attributed UNESCO World Heritage status. Managed by the state, the NMP has a resident population of just 7,000 but is visited annually by over 200,000. The main drawcards of the NMP are reflected in visitor activities and include the chance to swim with whale sharks, viewing the abundant marine life and recreational fishing. Unlike its big brother, the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), activities in the NMP are all close to shore and concentrated in both space and time at localised camping areas and towns during the cooler winter months prompting suggestions that Ningaloo might be in danger of being ‘loved to death’.
Despite a plethora of recent biological, physical and tourism data, the development of a clear understanding of how the Ningaloo ecosystem actually functions and the impact of anthropogenic and oil and gas related stresses on it remains elusive and lags far behind our current general understanding of the GBR. With tourism and oil and gas activities in the NMP expected to rise and the state government’s eye and purse now firmly focused on the Kimberley region of WA, there has never been a more important time to maintain the focus on Ningaloo and utilise the vast data sets that have recently been gathered. To date, summarised relevant existing science and models of this ecosystem include:
Questions
What are the key ecological attributes of the NMP that should be considered when planning and developing models of ecosystem stress?
What early warning indicators should be chosen to provide the best (sensitivity, ease of detection etc) indication of ecosystem stress?
Can we use surrogate models from other systems as a template for the development of Ningaloo-specific models?
What efforts to model the effects of stress on this ecosystem have been successful for conservation?
What has impeded accurate data collection and the development of these models?
What systems/technologies/innovations could be developed to better model the effects of ecosystem stress and the consequences of visitor use on the NMP, and to help determine which activities should occur in which places, both on the land and in the sea?
What additional resources or capabilities are required to achieve this?
How could models of this ecosystem be applied more broadly to other ecosystems (other three breakout group scenarios)?
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