Peter Gell

Federation University · School of Health and Life Sciences

Mangroves are an important coastal ecosystem in the global cycle of carbon and climate change mitigation. Unfortunately, a significant loss of mangrove forests has significantly increased carbon emissions over recent years. This research aims to measure the carbon stocks and potential carbon storage of the Tuntang Estuary mangrove forest. Sixteen q...

Diatoms, silicious microalgae, have been used successfully as bioindicators of water quality assessment in aquatic ecosystems. Diatoms have a degree of tolerance to the water quality and some diatoms are a good indicator for several water quality variables. Diatom indices have been developed to assess river water quality, mostly in Europe. This stu...

Galela Lake is the largest lake in the Halmahera Utara Regency, North Maluku Province, Indonesia, and is used for domestic water supply, irrigation, aquaculture, and tourism. However, its catchment has been cleared and developed for intensive agriculture. Therefore, there is a need to examine the land-use changes impacting the riparian vegetation o...

The lower Murray River (Australia) has been subject to considerable change from human activities, including the conversion of a variable flow system to one with regulated water levels and the conversion of the estuary to a freshwater system. These conditions will face further pressures owing to reduced flows and higher sea levels associated with cl...

The lower Murray River (Australia) has been subject to considerable change from human activities, including the conversion of a variable flow system to one with regulated water levels and the conversion of the estuary to a freshwater system. These conditions will face further pressures owing to reduced flows and higher sea levels associated with cl...

Prescribed burning is widely used to mitigate the effects of severe fires across the landscape and to maintain biodiversity. Just like wildfires, the severity of prescribed burns can vary; this study was an opportunistic investigation. In one fortnight during autumn months of 2012, several prescribed burns were carried out in heathy-dry forests of...

Global change in its various expressions has impacted the structure and function of ecosystems worldwide, compromising the provision of fundamental ecosystems services and creating a predicament for the societies that benefit from them. Restoration ecology plays a key role in securing ecological integrity and societal wellbeing, and hence represent...

Large rivers, including the Murray River system in southeast Australia, are disturbed by many activities. The arrival of European settlers to Australia by the mid-1800s transformed many floodplain wetlands of the lower Murray River system. River impoundment and flow regulation in the late 1800s and, from the 1930s, resulted in species invasion, and...

The Murray Darling Basin Plan (Murray Darling Basin Authority 2012) represents the largest investment by government in an Australian environmental management challenge and remains highly conflicted owing to the contested allocation of diminishing water resources. Central to the decision to reallocate consumptive water to environmental purposes in t...

The published findings on the diatom-inferred condition of a terminal lake in the Murray–Darling Basin were overlooked in favour of a revised unpublished interpretation, without the provision of new evidence or argument, posted on the website of the managing state government. Coauthors of the posted report have responded (Tibby et al. 2020) to the...

Freshwater ecosystems are among the most threatened in the world. The list of threatened species in freshwater ecosystems is greater than that in terrestrial or marine systems and freshwater vertebrates are particularly at risk. Freshwater wetlands have evolved in coastal zones protected from tidal influence by barrier dune systems. Similarly, estu...

The condition of floodplain wetlands of the Murray–Darling Basin (MDB) reflects the combined effects of climate variability, river regulation, vegetation clearance, and the impacts of human settlement and industry. Today, these systems are degraded, in large part due to changes in the hydroecology of waterways arising from water diversion and abstr...

Paleolimnology approaches were used to assess human impacts on Rawapening and Warna Lakes, small lakes in Central Java, which provide an essential function for agricultural irrigation. Paleolimnology is the study of the stratigraphy of lakes where fossils are well preserved in the sediment thereby providing information about the past condition of t...

The floodplain wetlands of the southern Murray Darling Basin (MDB) have been subject to the impacts of catchment and water resource development for more than a century. Their current degraded state is attributed to the regulation of the rivers and abstraction of water volume for irrigation. The MDB Plan is to return at least 2,750 Gl of mean annual...

The Murray Darling Basin Plan (Murray Darling Basin Authority 2012) represents the largest investment by government in an Australian environmental management challenge and remains highly conflicted owing to the contested allocation of diminishing water resources. Central to the decision to reallocate consumptive water to environmental purposes in t...

Freshwater systems are continuously shaped by cyclical and directional forces of change, whether they be natural or anthropogenic. Beyond gradual transitions disturbances can reset their internal dynamics generating an abrupt ecological shift. Long-term data sets of gradual or abrupt change can be accessed by exhuming the physical, chemical, and bi...

In the 12 years since Dudgeon et al. (2006) reviewed major pressures on freshwater ecosystems, the biodiversity crisis in the world's lakes, reservoirs, rivers, streams and wetlands has deepened. While lakes, reservoirs and rivers cover only 2.3% of the Earth's surface, these ecosystems host at least 9.5% of the Earth's described animal species. Fu...

Environmental changes such as climate, land-use, and fire activity affect terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems at multiple scales of space and time. Due to the nature of the interactions between terrestrial and aquatic dynamics, an integrated study using multiple proxies is critical for a better understanding of climate- and fire- driven impacts on e...

The Murray-Darling Basin Plan represents the largest investment in an Australian environmental management issue and remains highly conflicted owing to the contested allocation of diminishing water resources. Central to the decision to reallocate consumptive water to environmental purposes was the case made to keep the terminal lakes in a freshwater...

Lake sediments constitute natural archives of past environmental changes. Historically, research has focused mainly on generating regional climate records, but records of human impacts caused by land use and exploitation of freshwater resources are now attracting scientific and management interests. Long-term environmental records are useful to est...

Misuse of land and water resources has led to the degradation of many estuaries. As a result, present day management often focuses on developing strategies to reverse or contain these environmental impacts. However, a lack of long-term data on pre-impact conditions makes it difficult to define management goals and assess if management strategies ha...

The Coorong is a back-barrier lagoon that lies at the mouth of the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia. As part of a wider estuarine complex it was successfully nominated as a wetland of international significance under the Ramsar Convention where it was identified as a saline to hypersaline lagoon. Perceived obligations to retain this condition lead t...

Modern estuaries are naturally dynamic coastal environments that grade from the freshwater of a riverine ecosystem to the salt water of the ocean. The geographic location and the latitudinal climate setting determine the variability within an estuary, and the unique combinations of tides, waves and wind regimes, with the impinging ocean currents, c...

The aim of this edited volume is to introduce the scientific community to paleoenvironmental studies of estuaries, to highlight the types of information that can be obtained from such studies, and to promote the use of paleoenvironmental studies in estuarine management. Readers will learn about the the application of different paleoecological appro...

The Coorong is a long, narrow back-barrier lagoon near the mouth of the River Murray, Australia. It was accorded the status of a Wetland of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention in 1985 when it was described as a shallow, brackish-to-hypersaline lagoon. Historically the lagoon has played an important role as habitat for waterbird and...

Monitoring forms the basis for understanding ecological change. It relies on repeatability of methods to ensure detected changes accurately reflect the effect of environmental drivers. However, operator bias can influence the repeatability of field and laboratory work. We tested this for invertebrates and diatoms in three trials: (1) two operators...

Technical challenges in using diatoms for paleolimnological work are the identification and enumeration of diatom valves. Variations exist in the minimum number of valves to identify, ranging from 100 to 700 valves of the dominant species. This task can be very time consuming, particularly when the diatom valves are not abundant. This research was...