A landscape image of a coral reef, showing a variety of branching corals in the foreground and table coral in the background

Our research

Coral reefs and seagrass habitats cover only ~1% of the ocean’s seafloor. Despite this small spatial extent, these habitats provide a home for roughly 25% of marine species, and over half a billion people depend on them for varied services and goods (e.g., food, jobs, shelter, etc.).  

Unfortunately, these habitats are increasingly threatened by climate change, coastal development, overfishing and natural disasters. To better conserve and manage these increasingly threatened habitats, we require up-to-date spatial information to support decision making to help ensure these environments continue to exist into the future. 

Our research focuses on providing temporal and spatial information on the health of marine ecosystems to support management and conservation.  

We are developing cost-effective approaches integrating various forms of field data, citizen science, physical attributes, and remote sensing data to map and monitor marine habitats over time and space (e.g., coral reefs and seagrass). 
Examples of developed and implemented approaches to map coral reef habitats using field and remote sensing data since 2000 for various projects in Asia Pacific.
Seagrass characteristics are being mapped in Indonesia from collaborative efforts by citizen scientists, non-government agencies and universities with funding from the Packard foundation
Seagrass habitat mapping has been conducted to understand the biophysical characteristics of seagrass habitats through space and time.
Global coral reef habitat maps were created in 2021 and let by the UQ team in collaboration with international partnership through the Allen Coral Atlas.
To support management and conservation of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), we have created approaches for mapping the shallow reef habitats of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.
We support capacity building both online and face to face. We provide educational tools to share our expertise and experience, and we combine our work with citizen science
Field methods have been developed to assess ecosystem health and for validation and calibration purposes. We focus on close range , and spectrometry
Learn more about all of our current research projects.