Strategic long-term monitoring of seagrasses within tropical ports has provided insights into temporal and spatial variability in seagrass meadows, their relationship to prevailing environmental conditions and significant advances in our understanding of seagrass ecology. The outcomes of this work have led to new widely applied management tools including light thresholds that result in seagrass protection during development, assessment of blue carbon stocks, their value to dugong, turtle and fisheries and assessments of seagrass recovery and drivers of change. Innovative approaches built on this program have resulted in Australia’s first management of dredging based on ecologically relevant thresholds for seagrass.
The data collected also informs regional understanding of seagrass condition and marine environmental health, and has revealed a sequence of La Niña climate events from 2007-2011 led to widespread losses of seagrasses in the Wet and Dry Tropics. Some meadows were completely lost such as Mourilyan and have not recovered while a decadal-scale recovery is ongoing in Cairns and more rapid 2-3 year recovery occurred in Townsville. In response a new partnership between researchers, recreational fishers and Traditional Owners has been established to develop and test appropriate restoration techniques in Mourilyan Harbour. Seagrass transplants were monitored by drones over several years resulting in surviving transplants that were spreading 18 months after establishment, and a viable method to scale up to full meadow restoration. The techniques have the potential to be applied for meadows across the region where climate change scenarios predict similar loses of seagrasses could occur in the future. These insights would not have been possible without the long term monitoring approach, data and commitment from Ports and researchers.