The inaugural Australian Coral Records (AUSCORE) workshop was held at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) in early April, 1997. Coral records researchers and students from around Australia attended the workshop, which consisted of 1.5 days of presentations and 1.5 days of discussion. At the workshop participants informed the group of their work interests, identified areas for future collaboration, developed joint proposals/projects for future work, developed an inventory of expertise and available coral materials in Australia, and discussed strategies to ensure that Australian research investigating the nature and environmental significance of records preserved in coral skeletons has a high profile both nationally and internationally. The workshop was supported by the Australia Institute of Marine Science and the CRC Reef Research Centre.

Massive corals can provide high-resolution (annual and sub-annual) proxy climate and environmental records for the world’s shallow-water tropical ocean regions. The tropical regions are poorly represented by other sources of proxy climate records yet they are fundamental to understanding the global climate system and its variations. In particular, there is a need for understanding the nature and possible causes of inter-annual, decadal and longer time-scale variability of the tropical ocean-atmosphere. There is also a need for environmental managers to understand the natural long-term variability of tropical marine ecosystems, natural and unnatural changes in the systems and the possible influence of land-use changes in adjacent coastal regions. Massive corals can provide such information both for the last several centuries (from living corals) and for well-dated windows of the more distant past (from well-preserved dead and fossil corals). Proxy climate and environmental information is stored in coral skeletons as growth characteristics (eg skeletal extension, density and calcification; cf tree rings) and through a wealth of isotopic and geochemical tracers which become incorporated into the skeleton during growth. Examples of information stored in coral skeletons include sea-surface temperatures (SSTs), river flow, rainfall, upwelling, salinity and anthropogenic influences.

Australia is in a prime position to exploit the records contained in coral skeletons for three main reasons. First, Australia has one of the richest sources of coral material in the world; including living corals on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and the more scattered reefs off northern and western Australia, and from fossil corals at various sites. Second, from a climatological perspective, Australia’s shallow-water tropical ocean regions are inextricably linked to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the western Pacific warm pool and monsoon circulations. Proxy climate records from such sites will be of national importance and also will provide the link between international coral projects in the east-central Pacific and Indian Oceans. Proxy tropical climate records will also link to climate reconstructions developed from tree rings (in Tasmania and New Zealand) and ice cores (in Antarctica). Third, and perhaps most importantly, Australia has already developed a significant research capacity aimed at routinely extracting records from corals. Australian researchers have already made major contributions to the development and application of sophisticated techniques for extracting information from corals and to understanding the processes whereby corals store (and distort) environmental information.

The successes of the last decade have established the international standing of Australia in the field of coral-based paleoclimatology. The purpose of the Australian Coral Records Research Group is to promote coordination of research at a national level so as to maximise our potential contribution and hasten the work to full fruition. It is hoped that this coordination will lead to the "critical mass" required to reconstruct high-resolution paleoclimatic records for the tropics from their only known source.