A summary of an expert workshop convened in Perth, Western Australia, September 2006. Department of the Environment and Water Resources, 2007.

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• Characterisation of the marine environment of the South-west Marine Region (PDF - 240.84 KB)

About the report

This paper summarises the outcomes and discussions of the expert workshop, convened in Perth, Western Australia in September 2006 by the Australian Government Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (which was then the Department of the Environment and Heritage).

The objective of this workshop was to characterise the marine environment of the South-west Marine Region in a way that improves the Department’s understanding of how the Region’s natural systems work. More specifically, the Department’s aims for the workshop were to:

• Characterise functional systems within the Region on the basis of their location, their biological and physical components and how these interact
• Understand links across functional systems and the broad scale drivers of ecosystem functioning across the Region, including the importance of the interface between functional systems and the key processes that link neighbouring systems
• Understand the key areas of uncertainty surrounding the Region’s ecological systems, as well as the areas for which empirical evidence is available.

Appendix A includes the background papers circulated to participants in advance to the workshop. The papers were intended to provide the participating scientists with a broad overview of the marine planning policy and process, as well as to explain the structure of the workshop.