Summary
The Australian Antarctic Division has developed a long term coastal monitoring program at Australia’s Casey Station in East Antarctica. This evolved out of a series of field programs beginning in the mid-1990s. The early emphasis of these programs was on assessment of environmental impacts from Antarctic research stations, mainly of an old shoreline waste disposal site but also a number of other contaminated sites. It included surveys of soft sediment ecosystems, epibenthic communities and field experiments (settlement panels and sediment recolonization). Surveys compared impacted sites to a number of control sites and examined spatial variation, relationships with environmental variables and human impacts. This assessment work led to operational programs to remediate contaminated sites including the first cleanup of an Australian waste disposal site in Antarctica. Along with the cleanup came a commitment to monitoring both the short term effects of the operation and the long term outcomes of the remediation. Most of the sites have been resampled several times since and sampling is planned to continue with the next field season planned in 2013/14. While extensive data has been collected on biological communities and some environmental data, mainly relating to soft-sediments, one area lacking is oceanographic data. The long term goals of this monitoring now go well beyond fulfilling operational requirements to monitor remediation outcomes. The study will contribute information towards policy development in the areas of spatial management and climate change. We aim to develop ecosystem models capable of making predictions of the impacts of environmental change, such as shifts in sea ice extents due to climate change. Other planned outcomes include benthic habitat maps and the identification of key ecosystem parameters that may provide sensitive indicators as part of a sustained observing system for tracking ecosystem response to environmental change in the region.