by Hub Director, Nic Bax 

I write this at Valencia airport on my way back from the (first) World Conference on Marine Biodiversity, pleased to see the Hub’s increasing international impact.

Two papers were presented by researchers from the Biodiversity program. Anna McCallum from Museum Victoria presented a paper that asked the question whether Provincial Bioregions based on fish taxa corresponded to the provincial structure of other taxa, in this case decapods from Australia’s west coast. Phillip England from CSIRO presented a paper investigating the connectivity between different reserves in the Southeast Commonwealth Marine Reserve Network. Their report on the Conference will be in the next newsletter. 

The success of scientists working together was clear at this conference sponsored by MARBEF (a consortium of European marine biodiversity researchers) and the Census of Marine Life (a consortium of researchers from over 80 countries developing the first census of the world’s marine biodiversity for 2010). The really powerful papers came where scientists from different countries had pooled their data or samples to come up with results of broad-reaching implication for marine biodiversity research and conservation.

Australian scientists have a leading role in the Census. Ian Poiner is the new chief scientist and we lead CAML (Census of Antarctic Marine Life), POST (Pacific Oceanic Shelf Tracking), HMAP Asia (History of Marine Animal Populations) and the Australian node of CReefs (Census of tropical reefs). We host the Australasian node of OBIS (the Ocean Biogeographic Information System and international data delivery mechanism for the Census). The Great Barrier Reef (GBR) Seabed Habitat Mapping project is a Census project.

Now our hub is involved in Census activities – the statistical approaches developed in the GBR Seabed Habitat Mapping Project (and being refined in the Prediction program) are being adopted as the international standard for several Census synthesis projects.  Hub researchers are also involved in the international analyses of biodiversity on the shelf, continental margin and seamount working groups (Roland Pitcher, Gary Poore and Piers Dunstan, and Alan Williams, respectively).

Prior to the Conference, I was in a Census planning meeting to develop assessments of marine biodiversity for ~20 regions of the globe, one being Australia. (I’ll talk more about the Census in a later newsletter.) In the meantime, I’ll post the recently released annual report of Australian Census activities on the hub website http://www.nerpmarine.edu.au To whet your appetite, read a preview of the new CoML sponsored film “Oceans”, featuring in this newsletter.