Matt Curnock
Lunch and Learn Series
In mid 2024 the Reef Hub launched our ‘Lunch & Learn’ virtual series. ‘Lunch & Learn’ is a bite size information session we host once a month to share some of the relevant conservation reef science and First Nations approach to caring for country happening on our doorstep and in the greater region. We hope these sessions will be an opportunity to find out about the science and action happening to support resilience on our reefs.
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Join our mailing list to find out when our next Lunch and Learn will take place, and to join in live to ask our speakers questions. Otherwise see below for the recordings of the series that have already taken place.
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We also invite anyone from our Cairns-Port Douglas network who would like to share their work to support our region’s marine health to get in touch so we can arrange for you to be our guest speaker at ‘Lunch & Learn’ and connect with the Reef Hub network. If anyone has particular interests you would like us to cover, also please let us know!
March 2025 - Dr Christina Howley and Dr Stephen Lewis: Preliminary water quality in the Great Barrier Reef after TC Jasper & 2024/25 Floods: Findings in context of our recent past
Dr Christina Howley has been monitoring water quality and aquatic ecosystems across Cape York Peninsula (CYP) and the Great Barrier Reef for over 20 years, working closely with Traditional Owner Groups. She is the Program Director for the Cape York Water Partnership and currently oversees the Eastern Cape York Water Quality Program - a whole-of-catchment collaborative effort to quantify and reduce water quality impacts from gully erosion, road and track erosion, and wildfires in southeastern Cape York. Dr. Howley has managed numerous monitoring projects aiming to improve the accuracy of sediment load estimates for CYP rivers draining to the GBR.
Dr Stephen Lewis has worked at TropWATER, James Cook University for nearly 20 years. Over that time, he has covered many aspects of water quality research across the Great Barrier Reef catchment area and lagoon, including evaluating the sources, transport and risks of various pollutants such as sediments, nutrients and pesticides across freshwater, estuarine and marine ecosystems. Stephen has conducted water quality monitoring at sugarcane and banana paddocks, tributaries draining various land uses (conservation, urban, sugarcane, bananas, grazing), end of major rivers and in flood plumes off the river mouths and out into the Great Barrier Reef lagoon.
In this presentation listen to Dr Christian Howely, and Dr Stephen report on their water quality findings post Tropical Cyclone Jasper and touch base on the flooding events currently under way in 2025.
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February 2025 - Richard Fitzpatrick: An introduction to the work of Biopixel Oceans Foundation and an overview of their most recent work on the Great Barrier Reef
Biopixel Oceans Foundation supports marine research, exploration, and education. Our research continually evolves to address current ocean conservation and fisheries management challenges. Our focus includes:
• Studying the ecology of marine megafauna
• Developing and integrating new technologies for conservation
• Enhancing our understanding of shark behavior, particularly in human-shark interactions
• Providing ecological insights to support fisheries management
In this presentation, Richard will shares updates on shark research conducted on the Great Barrier Reef, including recent studies on: Whale sharks, Leopard sharks, Grey Nurse sharks and shark interactions
December 2024 - Dr Katie Chartrand & Dr Kerry Cameron:
All things 2024 coral Spawning School
We are wrapping up the year featuring some of the work we at the Reef Hub have helped to facilitate around coral spawning with our local Indigenous communities. Our 2nd Annual Spawning School with five Traditional Owner Ranger groups took place over the last two weeks during the November coral spawning period.
Hear from one of our Reef Hub coordinators, Dr. Katie Chartrand, and coral spawning guru Dr. Kerry Cameron who led the week long program. They share their knowledge and practical skills around the process of coral spawning, fertilisation and rearing of coral larvae before settling them out in a controlled aquarium system designed in collaboration with attendees. We hope you enjoy learning about this unique local program that we are excited to share with our Reef Hub community.
October 2024 - Dr Adele Pile:
The importance of monitoring in reef conservation, and the partnership needed to make it happen
Do you see what I see? A plea for monitoring for monitoring's sake.
Long term monitoring and research are crucial for informed, best practice management as well as providing valuable insights that inform research. Yet within the scientific community they are poorly perceived and with good reason as many monitoring programs fail and/or go underreported. This is further complicated as most academics view monitoring as the purview of management agencies and unrelated to scientific research. Attitudes towards monitoring aside, a key challenge to monitoring programs are resources and time. The ability to overcome these challenges and get researchers into the field monitoring can be achieved by partnering with nontraditional industries and traditional owners, the people who are out there every day.
September 2024 - Citizens of the Reef:
The story and science behind the Great Reef Census
Citizens of the Reef uses a 21st Century conservation model to involve everyday citizen scientists in reef conservation, helping to protect reefs across the world. The Great Reef Census is delivered in partnership with some of the Reef’s leading scientists and managers. Within just four years, the program has significantly expanded survey coverage across the Great Barrier Reef, helping to capture a broad scale snapshot of reef condition and provide timely information to reef managers and scientists that help to target protections. The Census complements existing monitoring efforts by filling critical information gaps and targeting reefs which are outside of current long-term monitoring programs. Additionally, the data helps to update reef importance scores, identify key source reefs and refugia which assist Crown-of-Thorns starfish control vessels.
In this talk we will provide the story of Census; how it started to where it is now, and the science behind census.
August 2024 - Johnny Gaskell:
A visual journey through the summer of 2024 across the GBR. The good, the not so good and a story of Hope
Johnny Gaskell is a marine biologist with over 20 years’ experience in marine tourism, research and education around Australia. Having spent the last 10 years focusing on the habitats of the Great Barrier Reef, Johnny combines his expertise with a passion for filmmaking and visual learning. He documents the Reef’s biodiversity, health, and environmental impacts, from the remote Far Northern deltaic reefs to the Swains’ patch reefs in the south. His current documentary work about unique geologic formations in the Reef and their role in protecting corals amid increasing disturbances enabled him to capture one of the GBR's most extreme years of coral bleaching and cyclonic impacts at varying scales across the Reef’s vast geographic footprint.
With scientific surveys still underway, the official full extent of impact from the summer of 2024 is still pending. Johnny will share a visual storyboard of his firsthand observations over 2024: from the microscopic process of symbiont loss and recovery, to the variability in impacts within a selection of individual reefs in the Northern and Southern GBR
Video currently unavailable
July 2024 - Prof. Michael Rasheed:
Seagrass restoration in the Cairns Region
Professor Michael Rasheed (TropWATER, James Cook University) is passionate about finding science-based solutions to apply in the management of marine habitats. He has been conducting research on tropical marine habitats for over 20 years with a particular focus on seagrass ecosystems. He has built a team whose work focuses on coastal development and risk and has significantly impacted on the way marine habitats are managed and protected. Results of this work not only lead to advances in the field of marine ecology, but have changed practices within coastal development, ports and shipping industries and improved the ability of regulators and managers to protect marine habitats.
June 2024 - Dr. Emma Camp:
Working towards adaptive coral stock selection for reef resilience
Dr. Emma Camp is a marine biologist and the Team Leader of the Future Reefs Team at the University of Technology Sydney. Emma co-founded Coral Nurture Program in 2018 and is the project lead. Considered a leading coral expert, her work focused on utilising scientific capacity to help preserve and re-build reefs. She has received numerous awards for her research, including the 2023 WINGS Women in Discovery Award, and in 2020 was named a Next Generation Leader by Time Magazine. Emma is a National Geographic Explorer and wants to engage society with research so that more people can become part of the solutions required to protect the planet.
(Please note that some of the recording from this Lunch and Learn session has purposefully been left out, as it contains data that has not been published yet)
Who we are
A place-based initiative to strategically enhance, empower and connect the efforts of diverse local organisations to support the Great Barrier Reef, resulting in transformative benefit.
What we do
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Build a skilled network
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Facilitate collaborative, practical reef science
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Champion local voices
Outcomes we support
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Strengthen collective capacity to care for local reefs and benefit the community
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Identify critical gaps in Reef knowledge and practices, and drive solutions that benefit partners and the wider sector
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Shine a light on local efforts and build partnerships