O’Hara Tim (2020). Expanding our spatial knowledge of marine biodiversity to support future best practice reviews. Report to DAWE from the National Environmental Science Program Marine Biodiversity Hub. Museums Victoria.
Overview
Bioregionalisations are spatial frameworks that have been used to identify areas that have particular conservation values, describe ecosystem boundaries, delineate bioregional planning activities, organise environmental inventories, contextualise environmental assessments, and map the marine domain. The Integrated Marine and Coastal Regionalisation of Australia (IMCRA) products have informed the creation of a National Representative System of Marine Protected Areas (NRSMPA) and provided a spatial framework for marine bioregional planning. This report argues that a new marine biodiversity spatial management system would be more cost effective and useful than a dedicated updated IMCRA bioregionalisation process. A more informative approach going forward is to develop a fine-scale (km) system of species distributional data which could be used to both address current management priorities AND produce a new provincial-scale bioregionalisation, when and if required. Such a system could be largely constructed from existing databases, analyses and decision support tools.
