Four Decades of Seagrass Spatial Data from Torres Strait and Gulf of Carpentaria: final report: project 1.13

The Gulf of Carpentaria and Torres Strait in northern Australia support globally significant seagrass ecosystems which provide food for migratory species such as dugong and turtle, habitat for commercially important fisheries, and underpin the livelihoods and wellbeing of the region’s First Nations saltwater people. Having a source of reliable data on seagrass distribution and species composition is critical to understanding how this ecosystem may be changing while managing for resilience and mitigating risks, and when designing monitoring programs in this remote region. Spatial data on seagrass has been collected across these regions since the early 1980’s, but the data was often poorly curated and its location and storage disparate. In many cases the data has not been publicly available, and in some cases has already been lost. To address these issues, we compiled, validated, and synthesized historical seagrass spatial data to create a publicly available database accessible on eAtlas (https://doi.org/10.26274/2CR2-JK51) under a Creative Commons 4.0 Licence.

N/A

N/A

N/A

9781922640086

N/A

N/A

44