Cairns-Port Douglas Reef Hub

A few highlights as we wrap up an awesome 2024 for the Cairns-Port Douglas Reef Hub! Thanks to everyone who has been a part of Reef Hub activities this year, it's been fantastic to work with and connect with so many of you, and to see the network grow. Also thanks to the Reef Hub steering group for all their contributions to guide the strategic direction of the Reef Hub, and to our funders Great Barrier Reef Foundation. We are excited to keep growing in 2025!

New grant opportunity open now for citizen science projects!

Last week, we wrapped up our second annual coral Spawning School 🪸 TropWATER scientists and Reef Recruits staff were joined by Gunggandji, Gunggandji-Mandingalbay Yidinji, Jabalbina, Mandingalbay Yidinji, and Yirrganydji Rangers for over a week of hands-on training in the aquarium and the lab. We cared for 10 corals collected from Pixie Reef, carefully gathering spawn bundles and helping along the first stages of embryo development. Together, we collected and cared for around 200,000 coral larvae. Rangers and scientists settled the 7-day old larvae on ceramic cradles (coral seeding devices) designed to provide protective homes for these baby corals. After 24 hours, we studied where the larvae chose to settle to see which device design the larvae prefer – providing key information for planning future community-led reef restoration. Spawning School is led by TropWATER’s Cairns-Port Douglas Reef Hub in partnership with Reef Recruits and funded by the Australian Government’s Reef Trust Partnership. Read more about the Cairns-Port Douglas Reef Hub: https://lnkd.in/g23fdK52 Great Barrier Reef Foundation James Cook University

Our next Lunch and Learn is covering all things Spawning School! This zoom seminar will take place this Thursday from 12:30pm-1pm. We are wrapping up the year featuring some of the work we at the Reef Hub have helped to facilitate around coral spawning with our local Indigenous communities. Our second annual Spawning School with five Traditional Owner Ranger groups took place over the last two weeks during the November coral spawning period. Join us for our last ‘bite size’ session of 2024 with one of our Reef Hub coordinators, Dr. Katie Chartrand, and coral spawning guru Dr. Kerry Cameron who led the week long program. They will share their knowledge and practical skills around the process of coral spawning, fertilisation and rearing of coral larvae before settling them out in a controlled aquarium system designed in collaboration with attendees. If schedules align, some rangers that attended Spawning School hope to also share their experience from the week during this seminar. Beyond the salty fingers and late nights, building relationships amongst rangers, the science team and with the broader community is a vital part of Spawning School. We hope you enjoy learning about this unique local program that we are excited to share with our Reef Hub community. If you are on the Reef Hub mailing list you should have a calendar invite for this Lunch and Learn already, but just send us a message if you need the zoom link. Thanks to Reef Recruits for this short video, head over to their Facebook and Instagram to see more Spawning School footage.

💻New Lunch & Learn seminars now live on our website 💻 Did you miss our most recent seminars from Citizens of the Reef or Great Barrier Reef Safaris? You can can catch up on both of these now on the Lunch and Learn project page on our website. Seán Daly and Christopher Lawson from Citizens of the Reef talked through the story and science behind the #GreatReefCensus in September, while our most recent seminar in October was from Adele Pile who spoke about the importance of monitoring in reef conservation and the partnerships needed to make this happen. Head over to our website to catch up on these and join our mailing list to hear about upcoming seminars. https://lnkd.in/gDVgmndd

🤿 Get ready for our next Lunch and Learn seminar with Adele Pile from Great Barrier Reef Safaris on Thursday 🤿 🗓️ Everyone on the mailing list should have a calendar invite, send us a message if you want to join. Adele will be talking about the importance of monitoring in reef conservation, more information below: 'Do you see what I see? A plea for monitoring for monitoring's sake. Long term monitoring and research are crucial for informed, best practice management as well as providing valuable insights that inform research.  Yet within the scientific community they are poorly perceived and with good reason as many monitoring programs fail and/or go underreported. This is further complicated as most academics view monitoring as the purview of management agencies and unrelated to scientific research. Attitudes towards monitoring aside, a key challenge to monitoring programs are resources and time. The ability to overcome these challenges and get researchers into the field monitoring can be achieved by partnering with nontraditional industries and Traditional Owners, the people who are out there every day.'

🌊 Collaborating to understand coral dynamics: Year 2 of Our Regional Recruitment Study is underway 🪸 Over the past few weeks, eight incredible organizations from the Reef Hub network have been hard at work on the water, deploying recruitment tiles as part of the second year of our regional coral recruitment study! 🔍 This study will play an important role in understanding where coral larvae settle after spawning, providing insights into individual reef dynamics and contributing to larger, GBR-wide models. These findings will help tourism operators, non-profits, and the scientific community make informed decisions about local reefs. 🌏 Together, we're covering six reefs across a vast area—from Agincourt to Moore Reef—deploying a total of 270 recruitment tiles in just two weeks! It’s a massive team effort, and we’re incredibly grateful for the skills, dedication, and teamwork driving this project forward. 🙌 The tiles will remain in place until early next year, when we’ll examine them in the lab to count coral recruits, once again with the support of our amazing Reef Hub network. Want to dive deeper? Learn more about this study and last year’s results on our website! 🌐 This project is run by the Cairns-Port Douglas Reef Hub and led by local partners Down Under Cruise and Dive, Jabalbina Aboriginal Corporation, Passions of Paradise, Quicksilver Cruises, Silver Swift Cruises, Great Adventures Cruises, Reef Restoration Foundation and Wavelength Cruses. The Cairns-Port Douglas Reef Hub is funded by the partnership between the Australian Government's Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and is coordinated by TropWATER: JCU's Centre for Tropical Water and Aquatic Ecosystem Research at James Cook University.

🪸Reef Hub Round Up🪸 Thanks to everyone who attended our first ever mini symposium yesterday! It was fantastic to have 70 people from across the Reef Hub network join us. It was a great opportunity to have discussions, hear the latest updates from locally led and larger scale projects in the region and think about how the Reef Hub can continue to connect all of these. Thanks to everyone who attended and to all of our presenters on the day. We had talks from: Morgan Pratchett from James Cook University, Dean Miller from Great Barrier Reef Legacy, Cameron Bee from Reef Restoration Foundation, Paige Strudwick from University of Technology Sydney, Le'a Dawes from Passions of Paradise, Mia Hoogenboom, Kevin Erickson, PhD and Bruce Taylor from Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program, Mattocks Neil, Julia Chandler and Kim Wright, from Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Vincent Backhaus and Tyá Dynevor from The Cairns Institute, Roger Thomas from Jabalbina Aboriginal Corporation, Jai Singleton from Yirrganydji Rangers, Brian Singleton from the Reef Hub steering group, Courtney Hansen from North Marine, Enrique Mosquera Alberto from Pacific Marine Group and Matt Radburnd from Newman Catholic College Cairns. The Reef Hub is hosted by James Cook University's TropWATER: JCU's Centre for Tropical Water and Aquatic Ecosystem Research, coordinated by Abbi Scott and Katie Chartrand and funded by the partnership between the Australian Government’s Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation.

This week our Hub Highlight is an exciting event next week run by Fight For Our Reef, the Australian Marine Conservation Societyand Divers for Climate 🪸 🐢🐋🤿 The Queensland state election is fast approaching. Do you know where your local candidates stand on protecting our Reef and the 64,000 regional jobs that depend on it? Join AMCS, Divers for Climate and the Barron River community for our Candidates Forum. This is your chance to get to know your local candidates and find out what they will do on critical issues like climate, renewable energy, water pollution, and fisheries, as well as hear from scientists and people who work on the Reef. You can register for tickets and submit questions in advance here: https://lnkd.in/gFXpccww Join us for the Reef Hub Round Up in the day and head to this event afterwards for a full day of Reef discussions!

🌊The principles behind the Cairns-Port Douglas Reef Hub 🌊 Back in the early days when the idea of a Reef Hub in Cairns-Port Douglas was being developed, the Great Barrier Reef Foundation held a series of focus groups. These were to to discuss the idea of what a Hub could do and what it should look like One of the things that came out of these discussions was a series of principles to guide working together and overall Reef Hub operations. These principles have been used to guide the development of the Reef Hub and are still at the core of what we do. Thanks to Great Barrier Reef Foundation and all the local partners who helped to develop these. The Cairns-Port Douglas Reef Hub is funded by the partnership between the Australian Government's Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation. The Hub is coordinated by TropWATER at James Cook University and enabled by the partnership's Community Reef Protection and Traditional Owner Reef Protection components, and the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program with a network of local partners.