Marine protected areas of the Flinders and Twofold Shelf bioregions

Along Victoria’s coastline there are 30 Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) that have been established to protect the state’s significant marine environmental and cultural values. These MPAs include 13 Marine National Parks (MNPs), 11 Marine Sanctuaries (MSs), 3 Marine and Coastal Parks, 2 Marine Parks, and a Marine Reserve, and together these account for 11.7% of the Victorian marine environment. The highly protected Marine National Park System, which is made up of the MNPs and MSs, covers 5.3% of Victorian waters and was proclaimed in November 2002. This system has been designed to be representative of the diversity of Victoria’s marine environment and aims to conserve and protect ecological processes, habitats, and associated flora and fauna. The Marine National Park System is spread across Victoria’s five marine bioregions with multiple MNPs and MSs in each bioregion, with the exception of Flinders bioregion which has one MNP. All MNPs and MSs are “no-take” areas and are managed under the National Parks Act (1975) - Schedules 7 and 8 respectively.

This report updates the first Marine Natural Values Study (Plummer et al. 2003) for the MPAs in the Flinders and Twofold Shelf bioregions on the east coast of Victoria and is one of a series of five reports covering Victoria’s Marine National Park System. It uses the numerous monitoring and research programs that have increased our knowledge since declaration and aims to give a comprehensive overview of the important natural values of each MNP and MS.

The theoretical underpinnings of rural injury and its impact on prevention programs

Many observations support the concept of an entity that could be described as ‘rural injury,’ yet the nature and limits of this concept are little explored. We demonstrate the complexity through descriptions along a single dimension: place.

Rural injury may be considered as consisting of both ‘Rural specific injury’ (Farm/agricultural, Forestry and Mining related injuries and Injuries in state/national parks) and also rural instances of ‘Injury which is not location specific’. Examples of the latter category include water related (especially boating & fishing), other industrial, Road Trauma, Sporting and Domestic injuries.

Building Nature’s Safety Net 2014 : A decade of protected area achievements in Australia

The single most important asset for the conservation of Australia’s unique and globally significant biodiversity is the National Reserve System, a mosaic of over 10,000 discrete protected areas on land on all tenures: government, Indigenous and private,including on-farm covenants, as well as state, territory and Commonwealth marine parks and reserves.THE NATIONAL RESERVE SYSTEMIn this report, we cover major National Reserve System initiatives that have occurred in the period 2002 to the present and highlight issues affecting progress toward agreed national objectives. We define a minimum standard for the National Reserve System to comprehensively, adequately and representatively protect Australia’s ecosystem and species diversity on sea and land. Using government protected area, species and other relevant spatial data, we quantify gaps: those areas needing to move from the current National Reserve System to one which meets this standard. We also provide new estimates of financial investments in protected areas and of the benefits that protected areas secure for society. Protected areas primarily serve to secure Australia’s native plants and animals against extinction, and to promote their recovery.BENEFITSProtected areas also secure ecosystem services that provide economic benefits forhuman communities including water, soil and beneficial species conservation, climatemoderation, social, cultural and health benefits. On land, we estimate these benefitsare worth over $38 billion a year, by applying data collated by the Ecosystem ServicesPartnership. A much larger figure is estimated to have been secured by marineprotected areas in the form of moderation of climate and impact of extreme eventsby reef and mangrove ecosystems. While these estimates have not been verified bystudies specific to Australia, they are indicative of a very large economic contributionof protected areas. Visitors to national parks and nature reserves spend over $23.6 billion a year in Australia, generating tax revenue for state and territory governments of $2.36 billion a year. All these economic benefits taken together greatly exceed the aggregate annual protected area expansion and management spending by all Australian governments, estimated to be ~$1.28 billion a year. It is clear that Australian society is benefiting far greater than its governments’ investment into strategic growth and maintenance of the National Reserve System.Government investment and policy settings play a leading role in strategic growth of the National Reserve System in Australia, and provide a critical stimulus fornon-government investment. Unprecedented expansion of the National Reserve System followed an historic boost in Australian Government funding under Caring for Our Country 2008–2013. This expansion was highly economical for the Australian Government, costing an average of only $44.40 per hectare to buy and protect land forever. State governments have contributed about six times this amount toward the expansion of the National Reserve System, after including in-perpetuity protected area management costs. The growth of Indigenous Protected Areas by the Australian Government has cost ~$26 per hectare on average, including management costs capitalised in-perpetuity, while also delivering Indigenous social and economic outcomes. The aggregate annual investment by all Australian governments has been ~$72.6 million per year on protected area growth and ~$1.21 billion per year on recurrent management costs. For the first time in almost two decades, however, the Australian Government’s National Reserve System Program, comprising a specialist administrative unit and funding allocation, was terminated in late 2012. This program was fundamental in driving significant strategic growth in Australia’s protected area estate. It is highly unlikely that Australia can achieve its long-standing commitments to an ecologically representative National Reserve System, and prevent major biodiversity loss, without this dedicated funding pool. The Australian Government has budgeted ~$400 million per year over the next five years (2013-2018) under the National Landcare and related programs. This funding program should give high priority to delivery of national protected area commitments by providing a distinct National Reserve System funding allocation. Under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), Australia has committed to bringing at least 17 percent of terrestrial and at least 10 per cent of marine areas into ecologically representative, well-connected systems of protected areas by 2020 (Aichi Target 11).BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATIONAustralia also has an agreed intergovernmental Strategy for developing a comprehensive, adequate and representative National Reserve System on land andsea that, if implemented, would deliver on this CBD target. Due to dramatic recent growth, the National Reserve System covers 16.5 per cent of Australia’s land area, with highly protected areas, such as national parks, covering 8.3 per cent. The marine National Reserve System extends over one-third of Australian waters with highly protected areas such as marine national parks, no-take or green zones covering 13.5 per cent. Growth has been uneven however, and the National Reserve System is still far from meeting Aichi Target 11, which requires that it also be ecologically representative and well-connected. On land, 1,655 of 5,815 ecosystems and habitats for 138 of 1,613 threatened species remain unprotected. Nonetheless, 436 terrestrial ecosystems and 176 threatened terrestrial species attained minimum standards of protection due to growth of the National Reserve System on land between 2002 and 2012. The gap for ecosystem protection on land – the area needed to bring all ecosystems to the minimum standard of protection – closed by a very substantial 20 million hectares (from 77 down to 57 million hectares) between 2002 and 2012, not including threatened species protection gaps. Threatened species attaining a minimum standard for habitat protection increased from 27 per cent to 38 per cent over the decade 2002–2012. A low proportion of critically endangered species meeting the standard (29 per cent) and the high proportion with no protection at all (20 per cent) are cause for concern, but one which should be relatively easy to amend, as the distributions of these species tend to be small and localised. Protected area connectivity has increased modestly for terrestrial protected areas in terms of the median distance between neighbouring protected areas, but this progress has been undermined by increasing land use intensity in landscapes between protected areas.A comprehensive, adequate and representative marine reserve system, which meetsa standard of 15 per cent of each of 2,420 marine ecosystems and 30 per cent of thehabitats of each of 177 marine species of national environmental significance, wouldrequire expansion of marine national parks, no-take or green zones up to nearly 30per cent of state and Australian waters, not substantially different in overall extentfrom that of the current marine reserve system, but different in configuration.Protection of climate change refugia, connectivity and special places for biodiversityis still low and requires high priority attention. FINANCING TO FILL GAPS AND MEET COMMITMENTSIf the ‘comprehensiveness’ and ‘representativeness’ targets in the agreed terrestrial National Reserve System Strategy were met by 2020, Australia would be likely to have met the ‘ecologically representative’ requirement of Aichi Target 11. This would requireexpanding the terrestrial reserve system by at least 25 million hectares. Considering that the terrestrial ecosystem protection gap has closed by 20 million hectares over the past decade, this required expansion would be feasible with a major boost in investment and focus on long-standing priorities. A realistic mix of purchases, Indigenous Protected Areas and private land covenants would require an Australian Government National Reserve System investment of ~$170 million per year over the five years to 2020, representing ~42 per cent of the $400 million per year which the Australian Government has budgeted for landcare and conservation over the next five years. State, territory and local governments, private and Indigenous partners wouldlikewise need to boost financial commitments to both expand and maintain newprotected areas to meet the agreed National Reserve System strategic objectives.The total cost of Australia achieving a comprehensive, adequate and representativemarine reserve system that would satisfy Aichi Target 11 is an estimated $247 million.

Constraints, segmentation, services, satisfaction and loyalty relating to park visitation.

Nature parks provide substantial recreation opportunities for the community. Improved park use through better knowledge of visits and what constrains people from visiting parks was the focus of this research. Certain park services affect different market segments’ experience; the experience and economic benefits in turn affect the loyalty of visitors.

Development of a whole agency approach to market segmentation in parks

Park agencies must plan to accommodate a diversity of visitors in order to satisfy visitor expectations and encourage future visitation. This study applies a market segmentation approach to develop a visitor typology that is effective across a broad spectrum of parks and applicable to a range of priorities, both strategic and operational, within park management agencies. Over a four-year period, data was sourced from over 11,000 interviews conducted at 33 diverse Australian national and metropolitan parks managed by the agency Parks Victoria. Factor analysis and cluster analysis was used to identify seven distinct visitor segments on the basis of numerous variables including, crucially, benefits sought. The applied and theoretical contributions of this study to the parks literature are discussed.

Yaringa and French Island Marine National Park habitat mapping

Deakin University and the Department of Primary Industries were commissioned by ParksVictoria (PV) to create two updated habitat maps for Yaringa and French Island MarineNational Parks. The team obtained a ground-truth data set using in situ video and still photographs. This dataset was used to develop and assess predictive models of benthic marine habitat distributions incorporating data from World-View-2 imagery atmospherically corrected by CSIRO and LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) bathymetry. In addition, the team applied an unsupervised classification approach to an aerial photograph to assess the differences between the two remote sensors. This report describes the results of the mapping as well as the methodology used to produce these habitat maps.This study has provided mapping of intertidal and subtidal habitats of Yaringa and FrenchIsland MNPs at a 2 m resolution with fair to good accuracies (Kappa 0.40-0.75). These were combined with mangrove and saltmarsh habitats recently mapped by Boon et al. (2011) to provide compete-coverage habitat maps of Yaringa and French Island MNPs.The mapping showed that Yaringa MNP was dominated by mangroves, wet saltmarsh and dense Zostereaceae, covering 33%, 29% and 19%, respectively. Similarly, intertidalvegetation and subtidal vegetation (dominated by Zosteraceae) covered 26% and 25% ofFrench Island MNP. However, as a result of turbidity and missing satellite imagery 27% ofFrench Island MNP remains unmapped.The coupling of WV-2 and LiDAR reduced potential artefacts (e.g. sun glint causing whiteand black pixels known as the “salt and pepper effect”). The satellite classification appeared to provide better results than the aerial photography classification. However, since there is a two-year difference between the capture of the aerial photography and the collection of the ground-truth data this comparison is potentially temporally confounded. It must also be noted that there are differences in costs of the data,the spatial resolution between the two datasets (i.e. WV-2 = 2 m and the Aerial = 0.5 m) and the amount spectral information contained in the data (i.e. WV-2 = 8 bands and the aerial = 4 bands), which may ultimately determine its utility for a particular project.The spatial assessment using FRAGSTATs of habitat patches within Yaringa MNP provides a viable and cost effect way to assess habitat condition (i.e. shape, size and arrangement).This spatial assessment determined that dense Zosteraceae and NVSG habitat classeswere generally larger in patch size and continuity than the medium/sparse Zosteraceaehabitat. The application spatial techniques to time-series mapping may provide a way toremotely monitor the change in the spatial characteristics of marine habitats.This work was successful in providing new baseline habitat maps using a repeatable method meaning that any future changes in intertidal and shallow water marine habitats may be assessed in a consistent way with quantitative error assessments. In wider use, these maps should also allow improved conservation planning, fisheries and catchment management, and contribute toward infrastructure planning to limit impacts on Western Port.