Chris Roelfsema

ABSTRACT With this three-year project from 2004 to 2007, The University of Queensland (UQ) team set out to provide a scientific basis to support community initiatives for the sustainable management of marine resources in Marovo Lagoon, Solomon Islands. We largely achieved this goal and provided the maximum benefit possible for local communities—albeit a work in progress. We learnt a lot, and this report captures important ideas and conclusions we trust will be useful for those who follow in our footsteps. Our UQ project team comprised 17 members, including: eight research academics, four postgraduate students, three part-time coordinators, two graphic artists, and several volunteers. In each year, our project successfully followed an annual theme. The first year, 2004, involved our introduction to these special Pacific Islands—becoming acquainted with Government Offices, key NGOs and the Marovo setting. During this first phase, we were generously hosted by Greg Young (Rural Development Trust Board) and family, who provided their home on Tengomo Island as our first base of operations in the lagoon. From there, we developed a dialogue with local village communities and began the synthesis of information that makes up this report and Technical Report. Our initial focus was a scientific assessment of marine ecosystem condition conducted concurrently with an assessment of related socio-political matters. To accomplish this, we worked closely with two Marovo communities in particular during 2005, namely Bili and Chea. In 2006, we responded to requests from these and other Marovo communities, and expanded our outreach to include all villages across the region, covering an area of more than 700 km2, with more than 60 villages and 12,000 people. For this reason, we are confident we have a good working knowledge of the views of the broader Marovo community. We learned about the environmental pressures present in Marovo Lagoon, and we built collaborations with enthusiastic individuals (such as those in Bili and Chea villages) and organisations (such as International Waters Programme, WWF, SILMMA and World Fish Center). Our aim was to collaborate with such groups to assist communities achieve sustainable use of their marine resources. To reinforce this objective, we maintained both bottom-up (village community) and top-down (government) strategies throughout the project. In regard to the latter strategy, our project was greatly aided by a pre-existing Memorandum of Understanding between The University of Queensland and the Solomon Islands Government. From the outset, our group members were, and continued to be, challenged by their effectiveness in delivering tangible benefits as ‘outsiders’ to indigenous communities in Marovo. This self-questioning was initially manifest in our openness to new ideas and viewpoints, coupled with our thrill of learning about such an exotic natural and social setting. We found people ready to learn, keen to teach us, and our collaborations have led to strong and enduring friendships and partnerships. We believe such partnerships were facilitated by the diversity of our team, which comprised members of both sexes and a wide range of ages. This helped forge many important bonds as we progressed through 2005 and into the second project phase, which chiefly involved the gathering of primary research data. During this phase, we made extensive use of locally owned guest house lodgings in Bili and Chea villages both to support local sources of alternative income, and to encourage close working relationships between the UQ team and village communities. Our final year, 2006, was scheduled as that in which we would feedback our results to communities and attempt to find a way forward. During this year, we achieved a very high level of communication throughout the entire Marovo community. We came to fully appreciate, for instance, that people consistently report dirtier lagoon waters, declines in fish catches, changes in benthic sediments, deterioration in reef condition, and losses of valuable upland forests with uncontrolled logging and clearing. The greater challenge became finding practical solutions to these matters. It was clear that communities felt powerless and ineffectual because they lack the authority to prevent even local exploitation of their immediate natural resources. This is due in part to the apparent failure of some traditional chiefs to exercise their authority in good faith and in an equitable fashion to the benefit of all in their community. Furthermore, there is no resource management authority speaking for the people that will act on their concerns and bring benefits to Marovo people. The UQ project hosted Marovo Environment Day workshop held at Batuna in June 2006, during which the 350 attendees who participated, aired their concerns about the lagoon, provided an opportunity for those gathered to identify mechanisms that might empower the community’s environmental agenda.…

ABSTRACT Currently, spatial light attenuation and water clarity can be estimated from diffuse attenuation coefficient at wavelength 490 nm (Kd490) available from satellite data. In the present study, we investigated the performance of existing satellite Kd490 algorithms in near-shore seagrass environment using available in situ data. We also examined the use of moderate-spatial resolution, multispectral imagery data of Landsat and ALOS AVNIR-2 to estimate both measured and calculated Kd490. Finally, we demonstrated conceptually on how Kd490 can be related to Kd of photosynthetically available radiation (KdPAR). The results showed that existing Kd490 algorithms can be used to estimate in situ Kd490 for sites with Kd490 <; 1 m-1. Systematic and strong relationships were observed between blue-green ratio of Landsat and AVNIR 2 bands, and either in situ Kd490 or calculated Kd490 from MERIS/MODIS algorithms. For some selected sites KdPAR can be well reconstructed from Kd490 using empirical model from which correlation between Kd490 and KdPAR can then be developed.

The views and interpretation expressed in this report are those of the authors and not necessarily those of contributing agencies and organisations. ... Grey Nurse Shark Habitat Mapping Project, Queensland 2003 ... 3.3 Abundance of Fish, Invertebrate and Substrate ...

Validation of benthic habitat maps produced from remote sensing imagery is quite time consuming and expensive. Validating maps of seagrass biomass is even more sophisticated and time consuming as the seagrass has to be collected, dried and weighed in the laboratory. We developed a method for estimating the dry weight of the seagrass based on photo transect data and a

ABSTRACT The spatial and temporal dynamics of seagrasses have been well studied at the leaf to patch scales, however, the link to large spatial extent landscape and population dynamics is still unresolved in seagrass ecology. Traditional remote sensing approaches have lacked the temporal resolution and consistency to appropriately address this issue. This study uses two high temporal resolution time-series of thematic seagrass cover maps to examine the spatial and temporal dynamics of seagrass at both an inter- and intra-annual time scales, one of the first globally to do so at this scale. Previous work by the authors developed an object-based approach to map seagrass cover level distribution from a long term archive of Landsat TM and ETM+ images on the Eastern Banks (≈200 km2), Moreton Bay, Australia. In this work a range of trend and time-series analysis methods are demonstrated for a time-series of 23 annual maps from 1988 to 2010 and a time-series of 16 monthly maps during 2008–2010. Significant new insight was presented regarding the inter- and intra-annual dynamics of seagrass persistence over time, seagrass cover level variability, seagrass cover level trajectory, and change in area of seagrass and cover levels over time. Overall we found that there was no significant decline in total seagrass area on the Eastern Banks, but there was a significant decline in seagrass cover level condition. A case study of two smaller communities within the Eastern Banks that experienced a decline in both overall seagrass area and condition are examined in detail, highlighting possible differences in environmental and process drivers. We demonstrate how trend and time-series analysis enabled seagrass distribution to be appropriately assessed in context of its spatial and temporal history and provides the ability to not only quantify change, but also describe the type of change. We also demonstrate the potential use of time-series analysis products to investigate seagrass growth and decline as well as the processes that drive it. This study demonstrates clear benefits over traditional seagrass mapping and monitoring approaches, and provides a proof of concept for the use of trend and time-series analysis of remotely sensed seagrass products to benefit current endeavours in seagrass ecology.