The benefits of thinking big

Extending 8000 km from New South Wales to Western Australia and including seas south of Tasmania, the Great Southern Reef is home to many remarkable species found nowhere else. Philanthropy is supporting research to better understand and protect this natural wonder, including funding the restoration of iconic giant kelp forests.

The Great Southern Reef rivals the Great Barrier Reef for beauty, biodiversity, and the fisheries it supports. Yet it is relatively little known and significantly underfunded, despite being located in a climate change hot spot.

University of Tasmania marine ecologist Dr Scott Bennett from the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) says the Great Southern Reef receives less than 1 per cent of the funding of its northern cousin. Two separate philanthropic grants are helping bridge this funding gap to better understand and care for the Great Southern Reef, including bringing back giant kelp forests.

“The philanthropic support we’ve had from the Sea Forest Foundation and now The Ian Potter Foundation is really allowing us to scale-up conservation efforts as well as our understanding of the marine environment,” Dr Bennett said.

“Through positive interventionist approaches we are tackling some of the great challenges we face.”

Great Southern Reef receives $2 million lifeline from The Ian Potter Foundation

The leafy seadragon, with its bulbous leafy appendages and bright colours, is just one of the miraculous sea creatures of the Great Southern Reef. Others include the blue groper and black cowry.

Indeed, for over two-thirds of marine species found on the Great Southern Reef, this is their only home – but with the waters off south-east Australia heating more quickly than elsewhere due to climate change, this precious ecosystem is under threat. Recognising the urgent need, The Ian Potter Foundation has stepped in with a $2 million grant for a project to protect the reef’s unique marine life.

As the largest research group investigating the Great Southern Reef, the IMAS Coastal Ecosystem Team has coordinated an ambitious plan to bring together all the research and existing collaborations across Australia’s universities and management authorities into a single collaborative project.

The project will gather knowledge and often overlapping data, coordinate research activities, and have a strong focus on communicating the science.

“Our vision is to create a shared understanding of the threats and management options needed to protect and restore the reef’s temperate marine life, and we are exceptionally grateful for The Ian Potter Foundation’s support to make this vision a reality,” said IMAS marine ecologist Professor Graham Edgar, who will lead the initiative.

“Perhaps the greatest indication of this project’s importance is that, without exception, every group invited to collaborate on this project quickly agreed,” he said.

“They know first-hand the scale of the problems affecting the Great Southern Reef, and saw the project’s critical role in protecting this essential environment for our children.”

IMAS researcher Associate Professor Neville Barrett adds that over the last 30 years across the Great Southern Reef, we’ve lost more than 50 per cent of the population of many types of invertebrates, from sea stars to sea urchins and molluscs.

“It’s imperative that we learn more about this decline,” he said. “We have to start to work out why it’s occurring.”

University of Tasmania Vice-Chancellor Professor Rufus Black said the University of Tasmania was proud to be part of bringing the Great Southern Reef into focus.

“Ambitious projects like this can achieve more than any single organisation working alone, and we sincerely thank The Ian Potter Foundation for this significant philanthropic grant to support this important initiative,” Professor Black said.

Sea Forest funds restoration of endangered giant kelp forests in Tasmania

The first forest-scale restoration of giant kelp in the Southern Hemisphere is underway with thanks to philanthropic support from the Sea Forest Foundation.

In October 2022, baby giant kelp was planted across 7000 square metres of reef on south-east Tasmania’s Tasman Peninsula.

If successful, the unique restoration project will create an area resembling a natural giant kelp forest. It’s the result of over four years of dedicated research by IMAS marine ecologists to investigate various methods and aspects of re-planting giant kelp.

IMAS researcher Dr Cayne Layton says the new project is making restoring larger areas of Tasmania’s giant kelp forests a reality.

“Our early efforts at IMAS built a really strong foundation for kelp restoration work. This project brings all that knowledge together and is moving our work to an exciting new phase,” he said.

Giant kelp forests have declined by over 95 per cent in Tasmania since the 1970s, driven by climate change and a strengthening East Australian Current that is driving warm, nutrient-poor water further south.

Giant kelp losses impact biodiversity, reef productivity and industries such as tourism and fisheries.

Dr Scott Bennett says, “The Sea Forest support has directly enabled researchers to scale up and think big in terms of forest-scale restoration of giant kelp for the first time.”

“Their drive to see these outcomes has really spurred us on and accelerated our thinking and our work.

“Thinking big about ways to take on these great challenges changes your mindset. Sea Forest have been quite instrumental in moving the field forward.”

Dr Bennett is overseeing the project and the field work around it, prepping the sites and planting the kelp babies as well as tracking the success.

“For that we really need to compare the replanted forests with the function of natural giant kelp forest,” he said.

The rapid growth rates of giant kelp has accelerated interest in kelp forest restoration.

“Giant kelp forests are an exciting habitat for restoration,” said IMAS researcher, Dr Scott Ling.

“Unlike forests on land, which can take decades or centuries to restore, giant kelp grows so fast that we can potentially regrow a forest in a year.”