This technical report details the methods and results the drilling programs of the Upper Burdekin Groundwater Project conducted as part of Exploring for the Future (EFTF)—an eight year, $225 million Australian Government funded geoscience data and information acquisition program focused on better understanding the potential mineral, energy and groundwater resources across Australia. This report was written by Queensland Government collaborators in the Department of Environment and Science, and is published here as supplied to Geoscience Australia at the conclusion of the project. The drilling program itself was conducted by the Department of Environment and Science as part of the Upper Burdekin Groundwater Project. A total of 17 holes were drilled in 2017-18 at 13 sites with a total combined depth of 943.2 metres. These comprise selected locations across both the Nulla Basalt Province and McBride Basalt Province. A network of 15 monitoring bores were constructed with two test holes backfilled and decommissioned.

The Evidence Based Decision Making (EBDM) paradigm encourages managers to base their decisions on the strongest available evidence, but it has been criticized for placing too much emphasis on the choice of study design method without considering the types of questions that are being addressed as well as other relevant factors such as how well a study is implemented. Here we review the objectives of Australia’s Marine Park network, and identify the types of questions and data analysis that would address these objectives. Critically, we consider how the design of a monitoring program influences our ability to adequately answer these questions, using the strength of evidence hierarchy from the EBDM paradigm to assess the adequacy of different design strategies and other sources of information. It is important for conservation managers to recognize that the types of questions monitoring programs are able to answer depends on how they are designed and how the collected data are analyzed. The socio-political process that dictates where protected areas are placed typically excludes the strongest types of evidence, Random Controlled Trials (RCTs), for certain questions. Evidence bases that are stronger than ones commonly employed to date, however, could be used to provide a causal inference, including for those questions where RCTs are excluded, but only if appropriate designs such as cohort or case-control studies are used, and supported where relevant by appropriate sample frames. Randomized, spatially balanced sampling, together with careful selection of control sites, and more extensive use of propensity scores and structured elicitation of expert judgment, are also practical ways to improve the evidence base for answering the questions that underlie marine park objectives and motivate long-term monitoring programs. <b>Citation:</b> Hayes KR, Hosack GR, Lawrence E, Hedge P, Barrett NS, Przeslawski R, Caley MJ and Foster SD (2019) Designing Monitoring Programs for Marine Protected Areas Within an Evidence Based Decision Making Paradigm.<i> Front. Mar. Sci</i>. 6:746. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2019.00746

Understanding the near surface migration patterns and rates of efflux of CO₂ is important for developing effective monitoring and verification programs for the geological storage of CO₂. Soil flux surveys are a well-established technique for characterising surface CO₂ emission sources from controlled release sites, CO₂storage sites or natural CO₂seeps. The performance of four interpolation methods; arithmetic mean (AM), two minimum variance unbiased estimators (MVUE), and a newly developed geostatistical cubic surface were evaluated using 21 soil flux surveys conducted over two controlled release experiments in 2012 and 2013, at the Ginninderra controlled release facility, Australia. Data was binned to approximate a regular sampling grid for improved performance of the whole-of-field AM and MVUE averaging techniques. The AM and MVUE methods were highly sensitive to deviations in the statistical distribution of the data, and performed inconsistently across the two experiments. These two methods proved ill-suited for application to CO₂ leak quantification due to their inflexible sampling and distribution requirements. The cubic technique provided the best net emission estimates across both experiments, and when applied at different bin sizes, estimating the true release rate to within 20% for the 2012 experiment and 45% below the release rate for the 2013 experiment. The cubic method is well-suited for CO₂ leak quantification because it is not limited by assumptions of the data’s spatial or statistical distribution. Net H₂O emissions of 29 kg/d were observed coincident with the high CO₂ flux zones in the field. The interpolation methods were applied with similar results on soil flux surveys taken from a natural seepage site in Qinghai, China. Gravity currents appear to describe the observed soil flux and soil gas behavior at Ginninderra, i.e. the observed lateral migration of CO₂in the subsurface. Subsurface migration was also strongly influenced by the relative depth of the groundwater. Thus the low water table and greater vadose zone in the 2013 experiment is suspected to facilitate greater lateral CO₂ migration and explain the poor closure of the CO₂ balance. <b>Citation:</b> I.F. Schroder, P. Wilson, A.F. Feitz, J. Ennis-King, <i>Evaluating the Performance of Soil Flux Surveys and Inversion Methods for Quantification of CO2 Leakage</i>, Energy Procedia, Volume 114, 2017, Pages 3679-3694, ISSN 1876-6102, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egypro.2017.03.1499.

Geoscience Australia (GA) builds, maintains and operates the Australian National Seismic Network and Urban Monitoring Network across the Australian continent, its territories and overseas. To locate earthquakes and other seismic activity across the country and overseas, Geoscience Australia streams real time data from 206 stations across Australia. Additionally, 100's of stations are streamed into Geoscience Australia from international data centres and monitoring agencies and institutions. From station design through to dissemination of data, the geophysical networks section at Geoscience Australia provides the seismic data that underpins critical seismic monitoring activities undertaken in Australia and internationally. All the Australian data collected by Geoscience Australia is publicly available from GA servers and is delivered to the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS). This data is freely available as a near real time feed and archived for use by other earthquake and nuclear monitoring centres, tsunami warning centres and well as research groups and institutions. Presented at the 2017 Australian Earthquake Engineering Society (AEES) Conference.