Aug 18, 2026 · 23 min · 10 segments
40 years, thousands of surveys and one extraordinary dataset. In this special episode of Reef in Focus, Lincoln Bertoli is joined by Mike Emslie from the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the…
Roger BeedenGuest
Mike EmslieGuest
Lincoln BertoliHost
across i guess the span of your career what what sort of things have you seen are conditions changing are they you know are the things that that make it worse for the better etc
When I first started back in the dark ages, we were interested in fundamental questions about the ecology of the reef.
And then in 1998, the first mass bleaching event happened, and that really changed the focus of a lot of the research that we've done, and particularly now that we're seeing these disturbance regimes.
So not only bleaching, but crown of thorns, starfish, cyclones are actually increasing in frequency.
uh spatial extent and in some cases intensity and that's causing declines in coral cover right across the marine park so you know a lot of the focus of what we do is looking how to how to respond to the impacts of these disturbances and whether they can recover as well yeah
and dave over to you mike's touched on it i guess uh a little bit but You know, it's arguably never been more important to be out there monitoring in terms of the Reef Authority's role in compliance and management to know how the reefs are faring.
Yeah, look, you know, the absolute foundation of what we do to manage the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park is the zoning system.
So our network of no-take green zones that cover about a third of all the reefs in the marine park and about a third of the total area.
If we did nothing else on the reef and just did the zoning plan, that would still be a world-leading exercise.
But on top of the zoning plan, we also do things at broad scales, like craniform starfish control.
Because over the last few hundred years, we've seen massive loss of tree cover and particularly riparian areas up creek lines and stuff.
So trying to minimise the amount of sediment and topsoil and nutrients and pesticides and everything else that's running off the land into the creeks, into the sea, has been a huge initiative for the government over a number of years.
so some of those really broad scale actions that we're doing so compliance around the zoning plan crown of thorns starfish control uh investment into water quality improvement all of those things play into what we observe both on the coastal habitats sea grass mangroves but also as you get a little bit further offshore into the coral reef ecosystem
um so where the long-term monitoring program sits is as an absolute um point of truth in terms of what we've seen since 1985 to now 2026 in terms of the level of change that we're observing in this system how the impacts of the climatic disturbance events that are fairly acute and then the chronic things that are happening sort of you know more around fishing impacts sedimentation and eutrophication of coastal waters various things that cause chronic impacts on the reef it also allows us to measure and report the outcomes and the achievements of the management systems that we've put in place.
So testing the ecological effects of the zoning plan has been a huge thing that we've been able to test with the LTMP data.
if we didn't have the LTMP we would not have an ability to be able to really assess the outcomes of those management actions
across i guess the span of your career what what sort of things have you seen are conditions changing are they you know are the things that that make it worse for the better etc
When I first started back in the dark ages, we were interested in fundamental questions about the ecology of the reef.
And then in 1998, the first mass bleaching event happened, and that really changed the focus of a lot of the research that we've done, and particularly now that we're seeing these disturbance regimes.
So not only bleaching, but crown of thorns, starfish, cyclones are actually increasing in frequency.
uh spatial extent and in some cases intensity and that's causing declines in coral cover right across the marine park so you know a lot of the focus of what we do is looking how to how to respond to the impacts of these disturbances and whether they can recover as well yeah
and dave over to you mike's touched on it i guess uh a little bit but You know, it's arguably never been more important to be out there monitoring in terms of the Reef Authority's role in compliance and management to know how the reefs are faring.
Yeah, look, you know, the absolute foundation of what we do to manage the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park is the zoning system.
So our network of no-take green zones that cover about a third of all the reefs in the marine park and about a third of the total area.
If we did nothing else on the reef and just did the zoning plan, that would still be a world-leading exercise.
But on top of the zoning plan, we also do things at broad scales, like craniform starfish control.
Because over the last few hundred years, we've seen massive loss of tree cover and particularly riparian areas up creek lines and stuff.
So trying to minimise the amount of sediment and topsoil and nutrients and pesticides and everything else that's running off the land into the creeks, into the sea, has been a huge initiative for the government over a number of years.
so some of those really broad scale actions that we're doing so compliance around the zoning plan crown of thorns starfish control uh investment into water quality improvement all of those things play into what we observe both on the coastal habitats sea grass mangroves but also as you get a little bit further offshore into the coral reef ecosystem
um so where the long-term monitoring program sits is as an absolute um point of truth in terms of what we've seen since 1985 to now 2026 in terms of the level of change that we're observing in this system how the impacts of the climatic disturbance events that are fairly acute and then the chronic things that are happening sort of you know more around fishing impacts sedimentation and eutrophication of coastal waters various things that cause chronic impacts on the reef it also allows us to measure and report the outcomes and the achievements of the management systems that we've put in place.
So testing the ecological effects of the zoning plan has been a huge thing that we've been able to test with the LTMP data.
if we didn't have the LTMP we would not have an ability to be able to really assess the outcomes of those management actions
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