eReefs

A modelling and monitoring system for the Great Barrier Reef built by CSIRO, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Queensland Government with the Great Barrier Reef Foundation; it simulates water movement, sediment, waves and biogeochemistry from the catchments to the open ocean.

What is reusable: open sourceopen dataAPIunknown participation CC BY 4.0Model results and observations are published under CC BY 4.0, the modelling software (CSIRO EMS) and the emsarray Python library are released as open source, and data can be reached through a visualisation portal, a Data Brokering Layer API or directly from the host agencies.

eReefs is a set of models and monitoring tools for the Great Barrier Reef, from the end of the river catchments and estuaries through the reef lagoon to the open ocean. CSIRO's technical pages name the collaboration as the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, CSIRO, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Queensland Government; the licence page adds that observations come through the Integrated Marine Observing System and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, and that the program is funded by the Australian Government's Reef Trust. The modelling suite has hydrodynamic, sediment, wave and biogeochemical models; the main runs are the GBR4 and GBR1 regional models, and RECOM lets a user configure a small local model nested inside the regional results. Satellite ocean-colour remote sensing is the other main line of work.

The program began in 2012 under the Reef 2050 Long-Term Sustainability Plan and the Reef 2050 Water Quality Improvement Plan. It tracks the fate of sediments and nutrients from land-based runoff, in partnership with the Paddock to Reef and Marine Monitoring programs, and supplies conditions to programs on bleaching, crown-of-thorns starfish control and reef restoration. The outputs page counts 111 peer-reviewed publications.

What is open: the datasets produced by eReefs observing and modelling are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence and may be reused in other products; the modelling software, CSIRO EMS, and the emsarray Python library for reading its results are released as open-source software, with the site saying this is done wherever possible. Data can be reached three ways: the visualisation portal, a Data Brokering Layer API that lets developers discover each product's data services, and direct links to the services at the host organisations. There are Jupyter notebooks, Python and R tutorials and a time-series extraction tool. Nothing on the pages read says how an outside group would contribute to the models themselves.

Status: in operation; the site presents current conditions on the reef, and its modelling team presented at the 2025 Australian Coral Reef Society conference. The CSIRO about and data pages were last updated in January 2023 and June 2024.