Australian Marine Parks manages 58 Australian Marine Parks located within Commonwealth waters divided into five marine park networks (the North, North-west, South-west, South-east and Temperate East networks) and the Coral Sea. It is presumed that a number of species listed under the EPBC use Marine Parks for activities that constitute critical components of their life history, including feeding and breeding. However, the extent to which they use marine parks and how important these parks are for the critical life-history components of these species are currently unknown.
The aims of this project are to establish the use of habitat within each of the Marine Parks for selected EPBC listed marine vertebrate species (excluding seabirds), identify critical habitat and map species’ presences and/or absence and critical habitat usage maps over existing park boundaries. The major threats faced by these species will be determined using data provided in each of the management plans as well as information gathered from stakeholders. Based on these data, individual threat maps will be produced and overlaid to create hotspot maps highlighting areas of greatest risk for these species
A prioritization model will be developed to rank species that are at greatest risk and in need of resource allocation to aid their recovery and ensure they can move towards delisting under the EPBC Act. This is similar to the approach taken by Tulloch et al 2020 to prioritize cost-effective mitigation strategies to reduce cetacean by-catch. The model will aid decision-making processes that assist species recovery as efficiently as possible.