What effects of climate change are happening in the D’Entreacasteaux channel area?

This is a great question, because we often think about the impacts of climate change on our favourite places and our homes. Tasmanian coastal waters and the Channel are some of the fastest warming areas in the world, also called the climate change hotspot. Apart from the warmer water for swimming and snorkelling, this also means that marine species and ecosystems are changing rapidly, and new species are arriving from further north. Some of these species are loved by anglers, such as the yellowtail kingfish. Other species are less welcome, such as the long-spined sea urchin. Unlike Tasmanian native urchins, these invading urchins can eat a lot of kelp, denuding kelp forests and creating urchin barrens. Kelp forests are disappearing also because of the heat waves and because the warmer waters and currents, reaching further from the mainland, have fewer nutrients.

Tasmania’s scientists and state government are aiming to preserve kelp forests by encouraging long-spined sea urchin harvest, breeding kelp that is more resilient to heat, and planting them back into the sea. The best thing we can do to increase resilience of marine ecosystems to climate change is to reduce pollution, restore natural habitats, such as seagrass and oyster reefs and, most importantly, ensure that the ecosystem has lots of large urchin eating fish and especially rock lobsters. Large fish and lobsters and important urchin predators and a natural control, and they do the work for us for free.  

You can learn more about the kelp restoration efforts here - https://www.imas.utas.edu.au/news/news-items/restoring-tasmanias-giant-kelp-forests-the-focus-of-new-research-project

Here you can learn about seagrass restoration here - https://ozfish.org.au/projects/tasmania-seagrass-restoration-trial/

Or if you would like to learn more about new species that are arriving to Tasmania, you can check out and contribute to the citizen science empowered Redmap Australia - https://www.redmap.org.au/

Finally, here is a great site by Reef Life Survey researchers and volunteers, mapping the changes that are happening in reefs around the world. You can zoom into Tasmania and select “Location time series” option on the top, to view summaries for the Channel https://reeflifesurvey.com/explorer/map