The Gladstone Healthy Harbour Partnership Report card has officially been launched.
It’s the first time a litter metric was used in the reporting and it was developed with the use of the AMDI Database.
“Litter is included as a formal indicator for the first time in the 2021 Gladstone Harbour Report Card. Results for the litter indicator are reported separately to the four components of harbour health (Environment, Social, Cultural and Economic) in the following sections. Currently this indicator has only one category, total litter, with the goal to divide this into three categories in the coming years. Total litter is compared against a baseline derived from four years of data from 1 July 2014 until 30 June 2018. Data are sourced from the Australian Marine Debris Initiative (AMDI) Database as collected by volunteers from across Australia, including at Tangaroa Blue Foundation and ReefClean events. Technical expertise for the calculation of scores and grades was provided to this project by Bill Venables and Tegan Whitehead (model development), and by Jordan Gacutan from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) (data filtering and processing). As this metric is based on a dataset collected by volunteers there is some inconsistency with sample sizes and sampling locations across zones and years. Scores and grades are therefore presented at the site level, rather than rolled up into a zone level score. This reduces biases on scores that would come with changes in sampling effort from year-to-year and will allow better representation and comparison of how the amount of litter has changed at particular sites across report cards. The following methods are described as per that designed for the Dry Tropics Partnership for Healthy Waters Report Card (Whitehead, 2020) with filtering methods applied by UNSW as per Appendix 4.”
Read more here.
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