Williams et al. (2009) report on new multibeam sonar bathymetry and underwater video data collected from submarine canyons and seamounts on Australia's southeast continental margin to 'investigate the degree to which geomorphic features act as surrogates for benthic megafaunal biodiversity' (p. 214). The authors describe what they view as deficiencies in the design of the Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in the southeast region of Australia, in which geomorphology information was employed as a surrogate to infer regional-scale patterns of benthic biodiversity. This comment is designed to support and underscore the importance of evaluating MPA designs and the validity of using abiotic surrogates such as geomorphology to infer biodiversity patterns, and seeks to clarify some of the discrepancies in geomorphic terminologies and approaches used between the original study and the Williams et al. (2009) evaluation. It is our opinion that the MPA design criteria used by the Australian Government are incorrectly reported by Williams et al. (2009). In particular, we emphasise the necessity for consistent terminology and approaches when undertaking comparative analyses of geomorphic features. We show that the MPA selection criteria used by the Australian Government addressed the issues of false homogeneity described by Williams et al. (2009), but that final placement of MPAs was based on additional stakeholder considerations. Finally, we argue that although the Williams et al. (2009) study provides valuable information on biological distributions within seamounts and canyons, the hypothesis that geomorphic features (particularly seamounts and submarine canyons) are surrogates for benthic biodiversity is not tested explicitly by their study.

This preliminary report will provide a geochemical and ionic characterisation of groundwater, to determine baseline conditions and, if possible, to distinguish between different aquifers in the Laura basin. The groundwater quality data will be compared against the water quality guidelines for aquatic ecosystem protection, drinking water use, primary industries, use by industry, recreation and aesthetics, and cultural and spiritual values to assess the environmental values of groundwater and the treatment that may be required prior to reuse or discharge.

The shallow water equations are widely used to model flood and tsunami flows, for example to develop inundation maps for hazard and risk assessments. Finite volume numerical methods are commonly used to derive approximate solutions to these problems, because of their potential to exactly conserve mass and momentum, and correctly simulate both smoothly and rapidly varying flows. However, there remain several common scenarios which often cause numerical difficulties. The occurrence of stationary water near complex wet-dry boundaries is a standard initial condition for tsunami applications. Many numerical methods will generate spurious waves in this situation, which can propagate into the flow domain and contaminate the solution. A related situation involves the simulation of run-off caused by direct rainfall inputs, which is often desirable for flood applications as an alternative to providing discharge inputs derived from rainfall-runoff models. Conserving mass and avoiding unrealistic 'spikes' in the simulated flow velocities can be challenging, particularly when the flow depth is much shallower than the elevation range of each mesh cell, as is practically unavoidable in large scale applications. Several techniques to robustly treat these situations have been implemented in variants of the ANUGA hydrodynamic model, and the performance of these is assessed in a range of ideal and practical examples.

Stations on the Australian continent receive a rich mixture of ambient seismic noise from the surrounding oceans and the numerous small earthquakes in the earthquake belts to the north in Indonesia, and east in Tonga-Kermadec, as well as more distant source zones. The noise field at a seismic station contains information about the structure in the vicinity of the site, and this can be exploited by applying an autocorrelation procedure to the continuous records. By creating stacked autocorrelograms of the ground motion at a single station, information on crust properties can be extracted in the form of a signal that includes the crustal reflection response convolved with the autocorrelation of the combined effect of source excitation and the instrument response. After applying suitable high pass filtering the reflection component can be extracted to reveal the most prominent reflectors in the lower crust, which often correspond to the reflection at the Moho. Because the reflection signal is stacked from arrivals from a wide range of slownesses, the reflection response is somewhat diffuse, but still sufficient to provide useful constraints on the local crust beneath a seismic station. Continuous vertical component records from 223 stations (permanent and temporary) across the continent have been processed using autocorrelograms of running windows 6 hours long with subsequent stacking. A distinctive pulse with a time offset between 8 and 30 s from zero is found in the autocorrelation results, with frequency content between 1.5 and 4 Hz suggesting P-wave multiples trapped in the crust. Synthetic modelling, with control of multiple phases, shows that a local Ppmp phase can be recovered with the autocorrelation approach. This approach can be used for crustal property extraction using just vertical component records, and effective results can be obtained with temporary deployments of just a few months.

Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) web services offer a cost efficient technology that permits transfer of standardised data from distributed sources, removing the need for data to be regularly uploaded to a centralised database. When combined with community defined exchange standards, the OGC services offer a chance to access the latest data from the originating agency and return the data in a consistent format. Interchange and mark-up languages such as the Geography Markup Language (GML) provide standard structures for transferring geospatial information over the web. The IUGS Commission for the Management and Application of Geoscience Information (CGI) has an on-going collaborative project to develop a data model and exchange language based on GML for geological map and borehole data, the GeoScience Mark-up Language (GeoSciML). The Australian Government Geoscience Information Committee (GGIC) has used the GeoSciML model as a basis to cover mineral resources (EarthResourceML), and the Canadian Groundwater Information Network (GIN) has extended GeoSciML into the groundwater domain (GWML). The focus of these activities is to develop geoscience community schema that use globally accepted geospatial web service data exchange standards.

Summary of last 12 months activity in Acreage Release Area.

Abstract for SGA Townsville 2009

The use of biological surrogates as proxies for biodiversity patterns is gaining popularity, particularly in marine systems where field surveys can be expensive and species richness high. Yet uncertainty regarding their applicability remains because of inconsistency of definitions, a lack of standard methods for estimating effectiveness, and variable spatial scales of their application. We present a Bayesian meta-analysis of the effectiveness of biological surrogates in marine ecosystems. Surrogate effectiveness was defined both as the proportion of surrogacy tests where predictions based on surrogates were better than random (i.e., low probability of making a Type I error; P) and as the goodness-of-fit between targets and surrogates (R2). A total of 264 published surrogacy tests combined with prior probabilities elicited from eight international experts demonstrated that the habitat, spatial scale, type of surrogate and method used to construct it all influenced surrogate effectiveness, according to at least either P or R2. The type of surrogate used (higher-taxa, cross-taxa or subset taxa) was the best predictor of its effectiveness, with the higher-taxa type outperforming all others. Surrogate effectiveness was maximal for higher-taxa surrogates at a < 10-km spatial scale, in low-complexity marine ecosystems such as soft bottoms, and using multivariate-based methods. Our comparisons with terrestrial studies of biological surrogates reveal that marine applications of biological surrogates still ignore some problems with several widely used statistical approaches to surrogacy, provide a benchmark for the reliable use of biological surrogates in all ecosystems, and highlight directions for future development of biological surrogates in predicting biodiversity.

Advanced burial and thermal geo-history modelling was carried out using Fobos Pro modelling software for the first time in Australia without relying on default or inferred values (such as heat flow or geothermal gradient). Our methodology is a substantial extension to the conventional approach.

We report four lessons from experience gained in applying the multiple-mode spatially-averaged coherency method (MMSPAC) at 25 sites in Newcastle (NSW) for the purpose of establishing shear-wave velocity profiles as part of an earthquake hazard study. The MMSPAC technique is logistically viable for use in urban and suburban areas, both on grass sports fields and parks, and on footpaths and roads. A set of seven earthquake-type recording systems and team of three personnel is sufficient to survey three sites per day. The uncertainties of local noise sources from adjacent road traffic or from service pipes contribute to loss of low-frequency SPAC data in a way which is difficult to predict in survey design. Coherencies between individual pairs of sensors should be studied as a quality-control measure with a view to excluding noise-affected sensors prior to interpretation; useful data can still be obtained at a site where one sensor is excluded. The combined use of both SPAC data and HVSR data in inversion and interpretation is a requirement in order to make effective use of low frequency data (typically 0.5 to 2 Hz at these sites) and thus resolve shear-wave velocities in basement rock below 20 to 50 m of soft transported sediments.