Benthic macroinvertebrate survey 2017-2018 – brief summary report: Coorong and Murray Mouth Icon Site

The Lower Lakes, Coorong and Murray Mouth is listed as a Ramsar wetland, protected as a National Park and partially as a Marine Park in the Encounter Bay region. Over the past decade there have been extreme environmental changes with the Millennial Drought and subsequent flood events (Wainwright and Christie 2008, Paton et al. 2009, Kingsford et al. 2011; Dittmann et al. 2015) (Figure 1). Typical of estuaries elsewhere in the world (Nebra et al. 2016), salinity is an important factor explaining macroinvertebrate distributions in the Murray Mouth and Coorong due to a strong salinity gradient (Dittmann et al. 2015; Hemraj et al 2017; Hossain et al. 2017).

Several years of continuous flow with moderate to high flow volumes have led to a recovery from drought conditions in the estuarine Murray Mouth and North Lagoon, but there were little signs of improvement in the South Lagoon (Dittmann & Baring 2016; Dittmann et al. 2016)...