Marine habitats in Northern Australia host globally significant levels of biodiversity.  This biodiversity faces rapidly increasing pressures from human activities, while extensive regional-scale knowledge gaps threaten to compromise efforts to conserve and manage it. 

This survey will begin to fill these knowledge gaps in one of the most poorly known regions of Northern Australia, the Oceanic Shoals CMR, by mounting a voyage-of-discovery to conduct representative sampling of both the physical environment and biological communities. 

The purpose of the Survey is to provide biophysical data and information on the shallow seabed environments for targeted areas within the Oceanic Shoals CMR (Fig. 1).  The survey will concentrate on shelf habitats (< 200m) of the western part of the Oceanic Shoals CMR and include potential biodiversity hotspots such as pinnacles, banks and shoals. The survey will complement previous marine environmental surveys to the eastern part of the Oceanic Shoals and Joseph Bonaparte Gulf undertaken by GA and AIMS in 2009 (SOL4934), 2010 (SOL5117) and 2012 (SOL5463).