This project investigates pesticide concentrations and trends across 11 sites of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) over the 2022-2025 wet seasons to determine pesticide impacts on the Great Barrier Reef.
The project includes:
- Time-weighted average water concentrations and spatial distribution of photosystem II herbicides entering the reef catchment areas at sites identified as high-risk areas.
- Temporal assessment of pesticides in the Marine Monitoring Program (MMP) region that is consistent with previous monitoring data established over the last 2 decades at a subset of the sites for ongoing load estimations.
It is expected this project will provide data to inform pesticide regulation and Reef 2050 targets in the Great Barrier Reef catchment areas, and assist in developing an ongoing program for assessment of long-term risks from pesticide use and the cumulative risk of pesticides using novel tools such as the Pesticie Risk Metric.
Outcomes
The final reports and data for the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 sampling campaigns have been published via the GBRMPA web site and are publicly available. The data was used to inform pesticide risk in the Great Barrier Reef catchments over the wet season.
Additional work in collaboration with DETSI, QLD was recently completed utilising the pesticide report metric (PRM) approach to assess pesticide mixtures risk in tropical wetland waters. Please see the published 2025 Science of the Total Environment paper below.
Additional work to establish chronic ecotoxicity thresholds for neonicotinoids for better risk characterisation in aquatic systems, including Imidacloprid which is often detected in the GBR catchment has been published, please see the 2025 Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry paper below.
Research Outputs
