IMIS - Marine Research Groups

CReefs, a project of the Cenus of Marine Life, is an international cooperative effort to increase tropical taxonomic expertise, conduct a taxonomically diversified global census of coral reef ecosystems, and improve access to and unify coral reef ecosystem information scattered throughout the globe. The goals of CReefs are to expand tropical taxonomic knowledge and increase the exchange of coral reef ecosystem data dispersed throughout the globe. Taxonomic efforts will focus on such understudied groups as sponges, octocorals, mollusks, polychaetes, crustaceans, echinoderms, tunicates, seagrasses, and red, brown, and green algae, as well as technological advancement and sampling strategies relative to these foci. Microbial diversity will be assayed in collaboration with the CoML Microbes efforts and substantial contributions will be made to the bar-code initiative. The partnership between BHP Billiton, the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, the Census of Marine Life and the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) will allow Australian reef sites to be included in the CReefs global research initiative. AIMS is leading a consortium of scientists that will sample and analyse coral reef biodiversity at three key Australian reef sites: the Great Barrier Reef’s Heron and Lizard Islands and Ninglaoo Reef in Western Australia. This dataset is a summary of the biodiversity from the Lizard Island area collected from two expeditions, 2008 and 2009. The consortium includes scientists from the Australian Museum, the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Museum Victoria, the Queensland Museum, the South Australian Museum and the Western Australian Museum, as well as the University of Adelaide, Murdoch University, the South Australian Herbarium, the Florida Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution. The team of international and Australian marine scientists and taxonomists will collect and identify samples during a series of field trips at all three sites over the next four years.