Seabed exposure and ecological disturbance on Australia's continental shelf: Potential surrogates for marine biodiversity

Disturbances characterise many natural environments - on land, a forest fire that removes a patch of old-growth trees is an example. The trees that first colonise the vacant patch may be a different species to the surrounding old-growth forest and hence, taken together, the disturbed and undisturbed forest has a higher biodiversity than the original undisturbed forest. This simple example demonstrates the intermediate disturbance hypothesis (IDH) that has applications in many natural environments. The application of IDH is significant for managers tasked with managing and conserving the biodiversity that exists in a given area.


In this report we have used models of seabed sediment mobilisation to examine IDH for Australia's continental shelf environment. Although other disturbance processes may occur (eg. biological, temperature, salinity, anthropogenic, etc.) our study addresses only the physical disturbance of the seabed by waves and currents. Our study has shown that it is feasible to model the frequency and magnitude of seabed disturbance in relation to the dominant energy source (wave-dominated shelf, tide-dominated shelf or tropical cyclone dominated shelf). We focussed our attention on high-energy, patch-clearing events defined as exceeding the Shields parameter value of 0.25. Based on what is known about rates of ecological succession for different substrate types (gravel, sand, mud) we derive maps predicting the spatial distribution of a dimensionless ecological disturbance index (ED).


Only a small portion of the shelf (perhaps ~10%) is characterised by a disturbance regime as defined here. Within these areas, the recurrence interval of disturbance events is comparable to the rate of ecological succession and meets our defined criteria for a disturbance regime. To our knowledge, this is the first time such an analysis has been attempted for any continental shelf on the earth.

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Identification info

Date (Publication)
2010-01-01T00:00:00
Citation identifier
Geoscience Australia Persistent Identifier/https://pid.geoscience.gov.au/dataset/ga/71210

Cited responsible party
Role Organisation / Individual Name Details
Publisher

Geoscience Australia

 Canberra
Author

Hughes, M.G.

 1
Author

Harris, P.T.

 2
Author

Brooke, B.P.

 3
Name

Record

Issue identification

2010/043

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Role Organisation / Individual Name Details
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EGD
Owner

Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)
Custodian

Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)

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Topic category
  • Geoscientific information

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S
E
W


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Unknown

Resource format

Title

Product data repository: Various Formats

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Data Store directory containing the digital product files

Data Store directory containing one or more files, possibly in a variety of formats, accessible to Geoscience Australia staff only for internal purposes

Keywords

  • GA Publication

  • Record

Theme

  • continental shelf

Theme

  • bathymetry

Theme

  • marine biodiversity

Theme

  • sedimentology

Theme

  • seabed

Theme

  • marine

Theme

  • CERF

Keywords

  • AU

Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC)

  • Earth Sciences

Keywords

  • Published_External

Resource constraints

Title

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence

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CC-BY

Edition

4.0

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

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License
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License

Resource constraints

Title

Australian Government Security ClassificationSystem

Edition date
2018-11-01T00:00:00
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https://www.protectivesecurity.gov.au/Pages/default.aspx

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Unclassified
Language
English
Character encoding
UTF8

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Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)

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OnLine resource

Download the Record (pdf)

Download the Record (pdf)

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  • pdf

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Unknown

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Non geographic dataset
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GA Publication

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Metadata constraints

Title

Australian Government Security ClassificationSystem

Edition date
2018-11-01T00:00:00
Website

https://www.protectivesecurity.gov.au/Pages/default.aspx

Classification
Unclassified

Metadata

Metadata identifier
urn:uuid/a05f7892-fa4e-7506-e044-00144fdd4fa6

Title

GeoNetwork UUID

Language
English
Character encoding
UTF8
Contact
Role Organisation / Individual Name Details
Point of contact

Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)

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Document
Name

GA publication: Record

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Geoscience Australia - short identifier for metadata record with

uuid

Citation identifier
eCatId/71210

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https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/a05f7892-fa4e-7506-e044-00144fdd4fa6

Date info (Revision)
2018-04-20T06:19:24
Date info (Creation)
2010-10-27T00:00:00

Metadata standard

Title

AU/NZS ISO 19115-1:2014

Metadata standard

Title

ISO 19115-1:2014

Metadata standard

Title

ISO 19115-3

Title

Geoscience Australia Community Metadata Profile of ISO 19115-1:2014

Edition

Version 2.0, September 2018

Citation identifier
https://pid.geoscience.gov.au/dataset/ga/122551

 
 

Spatial extent

N
S
E
W


Keywords

CERF bathymetry continental shelf marine marine biodiversity seabed sedimentology

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