WAMSI 2 - Kimberley Node - Project 1.1.1 Environmental Surrogates

The scope of Project 1.1.1 is to assess habitat and species as they relate to the management of the existing and proposed marine parks in State waters. This project will deliver improved understanding of Kimberley seabed habitats, while developing quantitative predictive spatial models to aid in understanding the key drivers behind these patterns and predicting them at a variety of scales within the existing and proposed marine park areas. Broader scale surveys will provide a characterisation of the habitats and benthic species distribution and will contribute to the Kimberley reference collection of biota at the WA Museum, while selected coastal areas will be assessed in much greater detail to inform MPA development in the Kimberley near shore environments. The finer scale work will include, but seeks to move beyond pattern description towards testable models related to processes behind the observed biological patterns. Project 1.1.1 will centre around ship-based field expeditions with a high discovery element, using towed camera benthic transects, a range of hydro acoustic and optical remote sensing methods and epibenthic sled collections, to deliver fundamental data on the nature and distributions of biota in a broad sense along the Kimberley coast and with greater detail within the existing and proposed marine park areas. Effort will be allocated to sampling representative field locations to characterise the nature and distribution of habitats and identify a substantial proportion of the species encountered and collected in the sled samples