Establishing long term Monitoring sites within mangrove and associated communities of Moreton Bay, South-Eastern Queensland, Australia.

Climate change is expected to have its largest impact on communities situated at geographic and topographic extremes. While projected warming will affect communities at high elevation, coastal communities will have the compounded effects of warming, reduced precipitation, sea level rise and changes to runoff. This is expected to result in ongoing impacts to mangrove and associated communities around the world. The Queensland Herbarium has commenced a mapping and monitoring project within Moreton Bay. This project is establishing 20 long-term monitoring sites within mangrove and associated communities and aims to document past and ongoing changes. These long term monitoring sites are a subset of sites established during the late 1990s providing historical site change information over the last 13 years. The sites will be re-visited periodically in the future. The selected sites will be correlated with regional Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) technology derived community structural attributes, such as tree height and density, providing a scaling up approach. A decadal time series of aerial photography from the 1940s to present will be established and will provide historical information and the basis for monitoring. An approach using vegetation indices applied to a time-series of imagery will help to distinguish between small seasonal differences and larger, more permanent changes such as mangrove dieback. This project based on over 70 years of information will provide a better understanding of the past and present dynamics of mangrove and associated communities in Moreton Bay. It will also provide a basis to project future community and species distributions while taking into account climate change.