Seagrass Habitat of Cairns Harbour and Trinity Inlet: Annual Monitoring Report 2022

Reason, C.;York, P.;Rasheed, M.

Abstract

1. Cairns seagrass meadows are monitored annually to assess the condition of three key indicators; biomass, area and species composition as a measure of marine habitat health. 2. The large coastal meadows in Cairns Harbour showed continued improvements in biomass and species composition within individual meadows and remained in an overall good condition for the fourth consecutive year. With these improvements they have now effectively returned to the state they were before the large disturbance events from 2009-2011. 3. The smaller meadows in Trinity Inlet improved from a poor to a satisfactory condition in 2022. This was driven by an increase in the biomass of the highly variable Halophila dominated meadows, although there was a concurrent decline in the biomass of the small Zostera muelleri meadow. 4. For the sixth year in a row the area of the monitoring meadows is above the baseline average while the average seagrass biomass per site continued its annual improvement and is now approaching the 10 year baseline. 5. The stable condition of the Harbour meadows combined with the improvements in the Inlet meadows indicate that the Port of Cairns seagrass meadows are well placed to thrive with the continuation of favourable growing conditions

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23/22

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TropWATER, James Cook University

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Cairns, QLD, Australia

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