Knowledge of life on coral reefs will be boosted from
this Wednesday (2 April 2008) when a team of scientists led by AIMS
heads for Lizard Island, north of Cairns, for the first CReefs
Australian expedition.
CReefs Australia, funded by $3.4 million over four
years by the giant Australian resources company BHP Billiton in a deal
brokered by the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, will address important
questions about the diversity of coral reef associated species
including how many species live on reefs, how many of these only live
in this habitat, and how this diversity responds to human induced
disturbance.
AIMS is leading the Australian node of the
international CReefs project. CReefs is the coral reef component of
the Census of Marine Life (CoML), a global network of hundreds of
researchers in more than 80 nations engaged in a 10-year scientific
initiative to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and
abundance of life in the oceans. The world’s first comprehensive
Census of Marine Life—past, present, and future—will be released in
2010.
The Institute has assembled a team of 25 scientists
and support staff drawn from AIMS and a group of Australian natural
history museums and herbaria to head to Lizard Island on Wednesday for
a three-week field survey. The expedition, led by AIMS research
scientist Dr Julian Caley, will systematically search waters around
Lizard Island for species previously unknown to science.
Later in the year, there will be similar expeditions
to Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef and Ningaloo Reef off the
coast of Western Australia. Three expeditions to each of these
locations are planned over the next four years.
"We can’t protect what we don’t know exists or know
how well we are doing it without comprehensive knowledge that can
serve as a baseline," Dr Caley said. "Taxonomy – the science of
identifying and describing the natural world – is indispensable but
has been in serious decline worldwide for many years, threatening our
capacity to provide this understanding of natural systems. We hope
this project can go some way to reversing this decline in capacity".
The scientists will use a variety of methods to sample
habitats around Lizard Island. Specimens collected from the sites will
be analysed by taxonomic experts at a number of Australian natural
history museums and herbaria who will describe and name new species,
publishing their results in global, publicly available, databases and
scientific publications.
As part of the BHP Employee Engagement Program linked
to this project, several environmental staff of the company will be
participating in each expedition, giving them unique insights into
marine science.
The Lizard Island CReefs team will be officially
farewelled on 31 March by the CEO of AIMS, Dr Ian Poiner, Ms Bindi
Perkins of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, and BHP Billiton’s Mr.
Shane Hansen, Asset Leader of the Cannington Mine.
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