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(Hugh Yorkston) The Great Barrier Reef is a huge and complex place, it stretches along
2,300 kilometres of the Queensland coast and there's at least 35 major rivers that discharge
water into the Great Barrier Reef. (John Bennett) The work that the reef scientists
have done over the last decade has shown us that the sediments, nutrients and pesticides
coming from grazing and cropping land is what's causing the major impact to the health of
the reef. (Dr Richard Brinkman) eReefs is a project
that attempts to combine a whole hierarchy of models to model the impacts of land run
off through rivers, down through estuaries and out into the marine environment, to try
to pick up changes in reef health associated with changes in land use practices.
(Dr Paul Lawrence) Governments, regional bodies and industries are already working closely
together, however through eReefs we are able to actually build a better platform for integrating
those models so that we can understand from the terrestrial, from the catchment side through
the estuaries and then out to the reef -- one integrated modelling tool.
(Rob Cocco) One of the challenges with water quality is that it's quite hard as a land
manager to know that the actions you do today actually have a benefit to reef health in
twenty, twenty five, thirty years' time (Dr Richard Brinkman) When you're trying to
understand where a particular farmer that farms in a catchment, where is his footprint
on the Great Barrier Reef, we can use these models to understand which particular catchments
are impacting which marine regions. (John Bennett) So we can then take that back
and work with the farmers and show them why they've got to minimise the excess fertilisers
and pesticides coming off cropping land, and the excess sediments coming off the grazing
lands. (Rob Cocco) We see phase one of eReefs having
been quite successful in starting the process, developing the building blocks.
(Dr Richard Brinkman) But even in these first eighteen months, we've delivered hydrodynamic
models that give a three dimensional description of river plumes and currents and temperature
on the Great Barrier Reef. (Hugh Yorkston) The second phase of eReefs
is going to be crucial to bring in those related issues on water quality, the transport of
sediments and nutrients, because those are the areas where the impacts happen in the
reef. (Dr Andy Steven) We need to move from traditional
research products which have a fairly narrow application to a set of systems that provide
operational information in near real time. (Peter Coburn) We're monitoring and operating
these models to a very high level of performance and reliability. We run ocean models that
map the currents and sea surface temperatures all around Australia and the hydrodynamic
eReefs model is really a specialisation of that sort of service and will be in fact,
what we call nested, within our current models. (Dr John Schubert) The ground-breaking work
that's been done here will be able to be taken and utilised in various ways around the world.
If we can achieve it for the Great Barrier Reef, that will be a huge success.
(Dr Richard Brinkman) One of the greatest innovations of the eReefs project is the ambition
to model the whole Great Barrier Reef, it's an immensely large and challenging region
and it's never been modelled as one unit before. (Hugh Yorkston) There's significant investment
into this project, but that's because there's significant value in the Great Barrier Reef.
(Dr Paul Lawrence) So we need to do everything we possibly can to protect that reef and also
to ensure that the catchments remain in good health.