Nationally the general public is developing a greater awareness about matters that relate to natural resource management and particularly the accelerating rate of degradation of coastal marine environments. However, concomitant knowledge and information that would enable the community to take a more overt role in supporting the management of these resources does not match this awareness.

There is therefore, a growing need to equip the community with relevant skills and knowledge about coastal ecosystems. The development of these skills will empower local communities and enable them to take an active role both in community based monitoring and advocacy leading in turn to improved management outcomes at local, state and national levels.

Coastal reefs provide an ideal vehicle for the development of such community based programs. These reefs are important in the provision of both food and habitat for many fisheries species and are also sites that receive high visitation rates for recreational fishing, diving and related activities. Importantly, reef systems close to metropolitan areas around Australia (and particularly the metropolitan coast of Adelaide) are degraded due to a combination of factors including waste water disposal, storm water runoff, over-fishing, invasive species and increased sediment mobility (particularly due to associated seagrass losses).

Effective mitigation and rehabilitation strategies can only be developed if managers are informed about the causal linkages between putative impacts and habitat degradation. By developing community-based programs to monitor and evaluate the status of reefs, we can make substantial progress in addressing this need .

Whereas monitoring activities need to be ongoing to provide the best opportunity for early problem detection, marine research is profoundly expensive. The use of well-trained community volunteers will provide an effective way to augment the efforts of other agencies and thus increase overall coverage of coastal ecosystems.

Australian and Canadian fisheries face the challenges of evolving domestic and international policies, the move to full implementation of ‘ecosystem’ and ‘integrated’ management approaches, and increasing market (and general public) pressure for certification of sustainability. The evolving landscape of management demands increased participation of fishers in management processes and shared stewardship responsibility, along with the need to adapt to changes in the ecosystem and public perceptions of sustainability. Several individuals and groups in Australia and elsewhere are wrestling with these issues. The need to develop sound and workable methods of implementing ecosystem based approaches to fisheries, has as one of its outcomes a benefit of generating reportable benchmarks of management performance that can generate increased public trust in the management of common resources. At this time there is need for a review of the approaches and priorities that have been developed around ecosystem based approaches to management, how easily and effective they are to implement, and how these can contribute to the generation of a ‘licence to manage’ for fisheries management agencies.