In this way, Australia’s SoE reporting process establishes an agreed and independent national-scale overview of the environment, providing direction without constraining governments to develop and implement specific policy and strategies to achieve required environmental outcomes for the assets and values. In other jurisdictions, state of the marine environment reporting systems typically utilise selected subsets of data and information, Navitoclax research buy derived from information-rich parameters and spatial models/inferences (eg the marine environment assessments of the Baltic Sea; HELCOM, 2009). However, system-level assessments based on narrowly derived metrics that may

also involve complex underpinning models, risk narrow outcomes for policy-prioritisation purposes that may not fully represent the system-level conditions and issues. The approach to system-level assessment reported here for Australia shifts the focus away from selected local-scale metrics and fine-scale examples BIBF 1120 cost which may be unrepresentative to a broad screening approach that is less dependent on data-richness and is more suitable for data-poor situations. This approach uses the professional judgement of an independent set of experts, summary aggregation and non-parametric analysis to present simple statistical summaries, and avoids model-driven composite indices and many of their associated issues (Rogge, 2012). The decision model used here also ‘hard-wires’

structure and function attributes of marine biodiversity and ecosystems so that key elements of condition quality cannot be overlooked Thiamine-diphosphate kinase (Lyashevska and Farnsworth, 2012). This focuses the assessment on intrinsic and system-level ecological aspects, now widely recognised as being essential to support the development of more effective broad-scale environmental policy (de Jonge et al., 2012 and Samhouri

et al., 2012). The broad-scale screening approach has a coarse resolution, and is thus potentially less accurate than individual and local-scale knowledge. However, the screening approach is likely to have more direct high-level relevance for national-scale policy making in large and data-poor systems, cover a broader spread of the system-level issues for which policy may be required, be more consistent with the basic concepts of synthesis and integration of knowledge (Andrews, 2012), and reduce the structural model uncertainty (sensu Walker et al., 2003) surrounding marine environment assessment on this scale. The objective of the national assessment reported here was to establish a system-level evidence-base from a set of informed expert judgements, and provide a rapid and high-level synthesis of the condition and pressures on the intrinsic assets and values of the Australian marine environment. To limit structural uncertainty and Type III error (the error associated with providing an accurate and precise answer to an irrelevant question: Bark et al., 2013 and Ward et al.