Great Barrier Reef

The reef is one of the most biodiverse and beautiful places on our planet.

Water is, most people just don't realise how essential it is for everything.

The Great Barrier for Catchment Reef Monitoring programme is a state of the art monitoring programme looking after the waterways of Queensland and ultimately protecting the resilience of the Great Barrier Reef.

All of our human impact up the coast of Queensland is impacting the health of the reef through our farming practices, industry, general population, urbanisation, all of that impacts the health of the environment.

Our programme looks at the monitoring of sediments and nutrients and pesticides running off catchments into the waterways and ultimately out into the reef.

This work provides the science and the real data to inform policy.

We look at changes in Land Management practice and the outcomes that that has on the water quality in the rivers that ultimately runs out to the reef.

We've got this this streamlined process of to getting data from the field all the way to something that the public can consume.

Our collaboration with the University of Queensland and James Cook University will allow us to be seen as the gold standard in water quality monitoring programmes around the world.

The programme collects a variety of information and it's used by a lot of different partner agencies, but the ambition is to actually drive change from people on the ground.

We work with a lot of stakeholders on the ground, individual growers, grower industry groups.

We run a collaborative type model where we don't just pay people to do the work, but we work alongside with them.

They're usually people that are interested in improving the water quality in their own little patch of the world.

We provide the training and the support and the advice for them to be able to do that effectively.

We organise for samplers to collect samples right across the state, send them down to us in Brisbane where we process them through the laboratories and receive the results back, which allows us to report back to the wider public.

We just don't have a number.

We all have a whole story about the data point and the data is helping us communicating that message on how we can improve the water quality.

By having this partnership with the universities and the Queensland government, we can now go beyond just a monitoring programme.

We're engaging with long term PhD students who are contributing to our knowledge base.

If you don't understand what the water quality is, that's going out to the reef.

You can't make the right decision.

You can't invest the millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars that are needed to fix up the degraded catchments in the right location to protect the reef.

So not only is it important for the future of the reef and building interest in it by improving water quality, but it's important that we don't put money where it's not needed.

We put money where it is needed.

Our data is the foundational data it's the cornerstone and it's really the point of truth of what's going on.

In the end, it's not just about the water quality going to the reef, it's about the water quality in all the rivers and the waterways.

One of the challenges that the programme actually has going forward is to promote the importance of this programme and how big it actually is on a global scale, because we believe it is one of the flagship environmental programmes in Queensland.

We're delivering something that's going to be a really worthwhile and that can be used in the future.