The National Environmental Science Program aims to assist decision-makers to understand, manage and conserve Australia’s environment by funding world-class biodiversity and climate science. With this overarching goal, the NESP Tropical Water Quality Hub provides innovative research for practical solutions to maintain and improve tropical water quality from catchment to reef. Now in our fourth year of operation, we are at the exciting stage of delivery of many of these practical solutions. Appropriately, in this edition of our newsletter, we highlight a few of the ways in which NESP TWQ research is already delivering for our stakeholders, including Indigenous businesses, landholders, surf lifesavers, port authorities and more.
From the outset it has been clear that achieving the NESP TWQ Hub’s goals would require not only targeted applied research projects that explicitly address stakeholder needs, but successful transfer of the new knowledge to decision-makers and stakeholders in useful and accessible forms. This is therefore a critical phase in the life cycle of the Hub, one in which we synthesise what we have learned in partnership with stakeholders.
In their Strategic Synthesis Workshop in Cairns in March 2019, the NESP TWQ Hub Steering Committee recommended that this synthesis phase be driven by stakeholder needs, and wherever possible use existing State and federal government agency frameworks to guide synthesis product planning and production, to help maximise opportunity for uptake and adoption by stakeholders, as well as to help demonstrate impact in areas already considered priorities by government agencies.
Our recent project leader workshop in Townsville reinforced these ideas to our lead researchers, ensuring everyone understands their roles and responsibilities in terms of communications, knowledge brokering and effective engagement with our many diverse stakeholders.
Meanwhile, fifteen new projects have kicked off this year, and our website is updated almost daily with new technical and plain-english publications from across our entire research portfolio. I encourage everyone to check them out.
Recent Publciations
Project 2.1.3 – Interim Report
Land Managers Decision Making about Water Quality: Views from Extension Officers of the Wet Tropics, Queensland, Australia
Project 2.1.4 – Technical Report
Cost effectiveness of gully remediation in the Burdekin catchment: preliminary insights based on measured data from monitoring sites
Project 2.1.5 – Final Report
Sediment tracing from the catchment to reef 2016 to 2018: Flood plume, marine sediment trap and logger data time series
Project 2.3.3 – Interim Report
Drivers and Trends in Environmental Markets: Applications for Australia
Project 3.2.1 – Technical Report
A framework for defining seagrass habitat for the Great Barrier Reef, Australia
Project 4.3 – Technical Report
Coral restoration in a changing world A global synthesis of methods and techniques