An integrated study of the Gladstone marine system
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Russ Babcock, Mark Baird, Rich Pillans, Toby Patterson, Bee Morello, Gary Fry, Mick Haywood, Kadija Oubelkheir,
Lesley Clementson, Emlyn Jones, Rob Kenyon, Col Limpus, Nugzar Margvelashvili, Mathieu Mongin, Barbara
Robson, Thomas Schroeder, Jenny Skerratt, Karen Wild-Allen, Nagur Cherekuru,
| GISERA Marine - Russ Babcock | 11-12 August 2015

GISERA & Development in Port Curtis
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• CSG developments are large, but …
Long History of Port
Development, other impacts
• Lessons or insights from
Gladstone are relevant to many other areas of coastal Qld.
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GISERA Marine overall goals
Improve the scientific knowledge base needed to anticipate and mitigate impacts, and to identify opportunities for trade-offs and offsets:
• assist agencies in evaluating and refining environmental trigger levels for water quality parameters and seagrass
• examine options for management of the iconic fauna such as turtles
• increase the level of confidence around environmental decision making processes in Port Curtis (and potentially more widely)
Insights from Gladstone are relevant to many other areas of Coastal QLD
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GISERA Marine Components
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Habitat quality – water column properties and seagrass distribution
Modelling
– Hydrodynamic / Biogeochemical model of Port Curtis; predicting water quality and seagrass growth
Turtle behaviour – habitat use and risk modelling
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2012
TSM Secchi Inorganic Fraction CDOM
2013
GISERA Marine | Russ Babcock

2012
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• Biomass of phytoplankton higher in 2012
• Diatoms dominant, green algae also present
• Sites outside the harbour different, dominated by cyanobacteria, picoplankton
2013
GISERA Marine | Russ Babcock

Inherent Optical Properties (IOPs) from model state.
Absorption Scattering Attenuation
Wavelength
Suspended sediment properties: scattering / attenuation observations from an ACS.

Surface reflectance estimates
Reflectance calculations based on field observations match well with remote sensing algorithms
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Model validation
• Species
• Depth-range
(presence/absence)
Turtle habitat use
• Species
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Cover
Biomass (wwt/dwt)

877 seagrass stations at 41 seagrass beds
CI1
CI2
CI3
CI4
CI5
CI6
CH2
CH1
PBS1
PBS2
FInew
PBN1 & 5
PBN4
NB1
NB3
FI2
NB4
Broad agreement with TropWater results

Critical light levels for seagrass beds
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1
0
-1
-2
-3
-4
0 y = -1.8054x + 1.6531
R² = 0.5084
0.5
1 1.5
Secchi depth (m)
2 2.5
13% Available PAR
4.5 Mol PAR m -2 d -1
4 Mol PAR m -2 d -1 corresponds with cut-off point in
GISERA seagrass growth model

High resolution sampling of seagrass distribution
Sampling design Observed Zostera

Thank you