Griffith University’s highly respected Australian Rivers Institute (ARI) has the largest group of university based scientists, with expertise in river, catchment and coastal research, in Australia. ARI’s research capacity spans the biophysical, social and economic sciences and will generate important insights into the linkages, interconnectedness and interdependencies which affect water quality from the catchments to the reef.
Specific expertise includes: catchment and river processes; resource economics; fluvial geomorphology; rehabilitation science; ecosystem-scale modelling; aquatic ecology; nutrient and sediment processing, transport and tracking; coastal and estuarine ecosystem processes; ecotoxicology; aquatic ecosystem health monitoring and assessment; natural resource management (land owners and indigenous); and spatial optimisation and prioritisation of investment and management action.
With this expertise, ARI researchers can improve our understanding of the source and cause of sediment, nutrient and ecotoxin loads affecting the health of the reef, develop and test approaches to reduce this load, generate the processes and framework to optimise the investment in management actions while meeting multiple objectives (environmental, economic, social and cultural) and develop monitoring methods and tools to assess the effectiveness of actions and the response from the freshwater, estuarine and coastal ecosystems.