Marine ecological integrity

Victoria shares a unique marine environment with the rest of southern Australia. Many species are found only here, and these marine ecosystems are as distinctly Australian as our terrestrial plants and animals. Victoria's marine biodiversity is unfortunately not widely understood and appreciated across our community, given that it is often out of sight under the sea surface, small and well-hidden.

Victoria's marine environment supports a wide range of highly valued uses including fishing, aquaculture, recreation, tourism and shipping. These uses depend on the sustained ecological integrity of our marine ecosystems, but can also place it at risk. The threats vary across the bays and open coast, but include exotic species, unsustainable harvesting of particular species, physical changes to habitats, seismic impacts, over-use, and input or resuspending of nutrients, toxins and sediment. These threats to marine biodiversity are also not well understood and can go unnoticed. In addition, the interactions among threats can be complex and difficult to predict.

Decorator crab	CA/CC SNAPSHOTS

There has been much progress in both scientific understanding of, and management approaches to, Victoria's marine environments. However, there is still a lot to learn and plan for continual improvement. Climate change is likely to pose new threats to our marine biodiversity, with possible effects including inundation and storm surges (in the nearshore), increases in seawater acidity, changes in catchment input patterns and changes in seawater temperature.

Marine parks and sanctuaries now protect 5.3 per cent of Victoria's coastal waters from a range of threats. The other 95 per cent also has significant biodiversity values and supports many uses. The large scale, multiple uses and complex inter-relationships of our marine environment require an integrated, ecosystem-based approach to management.

Informed by the best available science, we need to continue to manage threats in order to retain marine biodiversity while ensuring ecologically sustainable use of marine resources. At the same time, we must actively improve our marine management approaches and tools, and our scientific understanding.