by Prof Nic Bax, Director, Marine Biodiversity Hub

A major aim of the Marine Biodiversity Hub has been to promote collaboration among Australian marine researchers and thus improve the quality and extent of science available to support decision makers tasked with managing Australia’s oceans.

A key achievement of the Marine Biodiversity Hub has been to access data and expertise from different partners and come up with products that have contributed directly to marine bioregional planning. But can we do more?

I was curious to find out what the Hub’s collaborations looked like when we included the networks that scientists are contributing to through their Hub research. This newsletter explores the collaborative networks that the partners have tapped into to advance the quality of our research and the advice we provide to Commonwealth, State and Territory governments. At the same time these national and international collaborations meet another aim of enhancing Australia’s contribution to regional and national initiatives and partners.

Hub researchers contributing to major international initiatives including the Global Ocean Biodiversity Initiative (GOBI) and GeoBon have the opportunity to access international expertise but also influence international management and monitoring of the world’s oceans through the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Other collaborations including several through the Census of Marine Life, GeoHab, Tree of Life, and specialist taxonomic, threatened species and marine ecosystem groups are value adding to Australian research through large comparative studies that put our own species, systems and their management in the context of their world-wide diversity. One developing initiative is bringing Australian and Canadian researchers and students together to learn from each other’s biodiversity research and its translation to support evidence-based decision making.

At the national level, it is encouraging to read of the difference Hub research has made to MPA planning in NSW, the opportunities for a national volunteer-based monitoring program, and the degree to which collaboration between the Hub partners is improving the value that we get from marine surveys. And it is important to note that the collaboration is not only between the existing partners. Two workshops - one on sponge identification and other on predicting the distribution of threatened species - have brought in additional researchers to improve the advice available at the national level. This seems to be a major opportunity for the Hub – using the partners’ extensive research networks to bring together the top experts in the country and internationally to provide consensus advice to management agencies such as DEWHA.

See the collaborations stories that follow.