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Sims Project Restore

Published on: August 2024

Record: HANSARD-1323879322-143526

Sims Project Restore

Ms FELICITY WILSON (North Shore)

—Speaker I want to acknowledge the Sydney Institute of Marine Science and their latest fieldwork season for Project Restore. This ambitious project seeks to restore the degraded seascapes and biodiversity at up to 11 locations within Sydney Harbour. It aims to enhance and regenerate urban marine habitats by recovering lost seagrass meadows, enhancing kelp forests, installing living seawall panels, and deploying artificial fish habitats within the harbour. The latest fieldwork season has seen 141 monitoring trips completed, amounting to 1,128 hours in the field, and has yielded over 1,200 hours of underwater footage. The fieldwork team has completed the initial phase of fish biodiversity monitoring and has now transitioned to sediment and epifauna sampling, collecting 75 sediment samples from three sites so far. I congratulate the hardworking team at SIMS for all the time, energy, and resources they have poured into Project Restore for the betterment of our beloved harbour. Sydney Harbour is truly the crown jewel of Sydney and our community is so grateful to have such a talented team working to preserve its beauty.