Mid conference workshop:

Mid conference Workshop
Molluscs in marine bioregionalisation (half day). Organiser Dr Mandy Reid

Workshop: Facilitating the use of marine molluscs in bioregionalisation.

In order to effectively manage our vast marine environment to meet international obligations under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Australian Government has initiated a National Marine Bioregionalisation Project. Its aim is to better define what is in our oceans by synthesising key biological, geological and oceanographic data. More information about the project can be found at www.oceans.gov.au

A great deal of physical data has already been amassed, but the only taxa used so far to define ecologically meaningful bioregions for ecosystem-based management are sponges and fishes. Molluscs have been identified as an ideal taxa upon which to obtain spatial information that can be used to infer patterns in ecosystem structure and processes. However, the magnitude of the task is considerable. The purpose of the workshop is to enable a prioritisation of family-level taxa upon which to focus efforts at a national level over the next few years.

The half-day workshop will report on:

1. The status of marine mollusc collections in Australia in relation to their size, degree of digitisation and scope. We will also try to include information from three important foreign collections.
2. Agreement on family-level taxa that would be useful in bioregionalisation (i.e. those that have national coverage, are taxonomically stable, biogeographically informative, and data rich in Commonwealth waters).
3. A summary of diversity and geographical and depth distributions of target taxa.
4. The status of data for target taxa for each institution, for example, unsorted material, sorted but not databased, partly databased, or completely digitised.
5. Recommendations for a staged approach based on prioritised targeted families.
6. Timelines and costings for databasing of target groups for each institution (including identification standardisation) leading to uploading useful data to OZCAM and/or OBIS.

Given the relatively short time allocated for the workshop, and the nature of the data sought, attendees will be requested, about two months prior to the workshop, to provide some basic data. Following the meeting and the formulation of a list of priority taxa, each attendee will be sent a questionnaire to ensure that the data collected will be as uniform and accurate as possible and adequately cover those target taxa identified in the workshop.

Outcomes
The results will enable the efficient and effective allocation of government funding to institutions housing significant collections to identify and database molluscan data for use in OZCAM.