Course topics.

Try this with Marine Science

1. Compare the topic list with the current course outline from your school.
2. Pick a topic you can partly explain and identify the exact part you want to work through.
3. Bring one example of the kind of question or task your school uses.

View Marine Science resources on ATARMAXXING ↗

Topics in the resource inventory

• Where reefs grow: global and Australian distribution, latitudinal and cross-shelf patterns, and the abiotic limits on corals
• How the Great Barrier Reef formed: geological history, sea-level change since 20 000 BP, reef types and reef zonation
• Coral classification and anatomy: soft and hard corals, hermatypic and ahermatypic corals, genus keys and building the limestone skeleton
• Coral feeding, symbiosis and life cycles: nematocysts, zooxanthellae, reproduction, larval recruitment and reef accretion
• Habitat complexity and connectivity: corals as ecosystem engineers, rugosity, mangroves, seagrass, estuaries and herbivorous fish
• Reading reef health data: diversity indices, Whittaker plots, coral cover trends, water quality, tipping points and hysteresis
• Human pressures on coral reefs and modelled reef futures: run-off, crown-of-thorns, overfishing, dredging, shipping and climate change
• Coral bleaching: Shelford's law of tolerance, sea surface temperature, degree heating weeks, ecological effects and recovery
• Coral cores as environmental archives: growth bands, luminescence, run-off proxies and the climate record
• The ocean carbonate system: buffering, acidification chemistry, CO2 sources, the biological pump and the carbonate compensation depth
• Aragonite, calcifiers and acidification evidence: saturation state calculations, laboratory versus field experiments and reef resilience
• Why and how we protect marine areas: ecological, economic, ethical and aesthetic values and the criteria for designing MPAs
• Managing marine ecosystems: zoning, permits, monitoring, judging MPA success, and government versus non-government roles
• Oceans of the future: atmosphere–ocean interactions, warming, indirect effects of acidification and interpreting climate scenario data
• What a fishery is and why fisheries decline: fishery types, protein security, overfishing, fishing down the food web and shifting baselines
• What controls where fish live: temperature, productivity, upwelling, thermal regime shifts, rugosity, and bioaccumulation in seafood
• Estimating fish populations: the BIDE model, the Lincoln index and the reliability of fisheries data
• Managing for sustainability: MSY versus MEY, ecosystem-based management, MPAs for fisheries, migratory species agreements and decline versus recovery case studies
• Australia's fisheries: the AFZ, governance, trade and value, TAC and quotas, dynamic spatial zoning and the precautionary principle
• Aquaculture: food security, ABARES trends, choosing a species, carrying capacity, farming systems and environmental issues