Can you explain that in a bit more detail? What is a multiple use marine park?

Well, so people like to do things out on coral reef systems around the world, lots of different types of things.

And you've touched on some of those.

Some people like to enjoy them to just go and take photographs of them or go and recreate in those areas.

Other people want to go fishing.

And sometimes there's commercial businesses, whether it's tourism, whether it's like coastal developments and the like that actually might be.

There's industrial activities along coastlines.

Can you touch on those stewardship programs in a little more detail? What is a high standard tourism operator and what is a master reef guide?

yeah okay and dave you guys both sort of touched on it earlier um we are seeing i guess from these impacts there are species of coral that can bounce back more quickly than others perhaps faster growing species etc putting all this together can i ask you mate to start with What are you hoping to, I guess, or what are you trying to answer over the next 10 years? What are marine scientists like the both of you looking to answer over this time?

Well, in my current role, what's really important is that I'm able to demonstrate using all the data that's available to me and the skills of my team that we're actually doing something of use on the reef is that, you know, for 20 to currently $30 million a year investment, we have a big responsibility to make sure that we are actually deploying our resources and the assets that are available to us to best use.

So with three and a half thousand reefs out there and something that's the size of Japan, we've got an enormous marine estate that we're responsible for.

So working out how we actually amplify the benefits of the management actions that we're investing in, including crown thorn and starfish control, but how that's used to actually augment the benefits, the underlying benefits that come from the Marine Park Zoning Plan and other things that we do on the reef.

Those cumulative benefits of what we're doing, is it enough to help maintain the resilience of this ecosystem into the future? And so there's some big questions around that.

At this point, the reef is proving itself to be very strong.

As Mike was saying, some of these corals are bouncing back incredibly quickly after storms.

yeah okay dave you care to add to that in your uh throughout your career in marine science it seems like it's sort of largely the benchmark for this type of uh monitoring

Our first question is, what does bleaching do to coral? Can you explain it in simple terms? What is coral bleaching and how does it affect the Great Barrier Reef?

Sure.

Thanks, Lincoln.

So really coral bleaching is just a stress response in corals.

Corals are animals.

They're actually pretty simple animals.

They're like a jellyfish that people would be familiar with that actually you turn that over and put it inside a cup of calcium carbonate, like chalk cup.

So our next question is, how do, say, something like a tropical cyclone and the inherent flooding that might follow affect the Great Barrier

Hypothetically, um, if there were no, uh, green zones, what does the reef look like? What's the effect of that?

Well, um, it is hypothetical, but the, but the reality is that we have both have long-term monitoring information and then there's actually some recent publications that have shown, um, done exactly the analysis [laughs] that you're talking about, and there's a couple of really interesting findings from that, uh, research, and that's been calibrated against the long-term monitoring, so the observations that are in the water.

So two key things or three key things probably would've happened had we not have increased the area that was no-take.

Uh, one, we would've seen a, a very substantial decline in some of the key fish species that people like to go and catch.

So this is why, you know, the zoning rules are crucially important both for the conservation values of the park as well as actually if you just like to go fishing.

Um, the other thing that we now know is that some of those fish species, predatory fish species, some of the emperors and the like that we like to go and catch, um, those are really important at keeping things like baby crown-of-thorns starfish in check, and actually the adults as well.

And so we would've likely seen, uh, an increase in the frequency of crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks and the, the severity of those outbreaks.

Where do we fit into this? So, uh, as the Reef Authority, where does resilience-based management come into, um, helping all this come together?