South-West Corner Marine Park Post Survey Report

The South-west Corner Marine Park survey was undertaken as a collaboration between the University of Western Australia (UWA), Geoscience Australia (GA), the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (University of Tasmania) and the IMOS AUV facility. The survey was a contribution to Marine Biodiversity Hub Project D3, ‘Implementing monitoring of Australian Marine Parks and the status of marine biodiversity assets on the continental shelf’; that aims to build baseline knowledge for marine parks in priority areas of the national network.

South-west Corner Marine Park is one of 14 parks in the South-west Network of Australian Marine Parks. The park is the largest in the network, extending from offshore Cape Naturaliste around south-west Australia to offshore Esperance covering an area of 271,833km2. The NESP Marine Biodiversity Hub survey focused on continental shelf habitats withinthe National Park Zone and adjacent Special Purpose Zone (Mining Exclusion) offshore from the Cape Mentelle to Cape Freycinet coastline of southwest Western Australia.

The purpose of this survey was to apply standardised methods of data collection to build the

baseline inventory of reef habitat at these locations that will be used to support ongoing

monitoring of South-west Corner Marine Park. Due to the interruptions and delays caused by

COVID not all data sets were able to be annotated and only exploratory analysis of the

processed data was undertaken in the current report.