Report Card

The Wet Tropics Report Card assesses the condition of the region’s nine catchments and eight of its estuaries, as well as the inshore marine and offshore marine zones.

The annual reporting periods align with financial years (1st July to 30th June), with ten consecutive reports now covering the period from 2014-15 to 2024-25. The grades in the Report Card are developed by analysing and integrating scientific monitoring data contributed by many organisations.

Wet Tropics Waterways is continually refining the assessment to include new indicators and methods that fill known knowledge gaps.

Basin and estuary assessments involve the monitoring of multiple indicators of water quality, habitat and hydrology and fish (basins only). This monitoring occurs at:

• Nine freshwater basins – Daintree, Mossman, Barron, Mulgrave, Russell, Johnstone, Tully, Murray and Herbert.
• Eight estuaries – Daintree, Dickson Inlet, Barron, Trinity Inlet, Russell-Mulgrave, Johnstone, Moresby and Hinchinbrook Channel.

Assessment of the North, Central, South, and Palm Island inshore marine zones is based on monitoring of water quality, coral and seagrass, while the single Offshore marine zone is assessed from coral monitoring.

We now have a comprehensive picture of the current condition of our waterways and we are in a good position to track trends in the health of our estuaries, freshwaters and marine zones to see how they are responding to the community’s ‘stewardship’ efforts. For presentation purposes scores are rounded down to whole numbers.

More detailed information on the grades and the methods used to generate them is available on this in the methods and results reports.