Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins utilise estuaries tend to be highly site specific making them more vulnerable to injury, disease and mortality due to the cumulative number of threats posed by human activities.

In recent years, concerns for the status and health of dolphin communities that use Australia’s estuaries have increased. Despite these concerns and the economic, social, cultural and environmental value of dolphins, there remains very little understanding of the relationships between estuarine condition and the health of dolphin communities.

This project will fill these vital knowledge gaps by examining the status and health of dolphin communities in estuaries of Northern New South Wales with the assistance of citizen scientists. The relationships between estuarine conditions, using information from regional waterway assessments and the status of dolphin communities, will also provide crucial information to inform the management and conservation of biodiversity in these systems.

This project aims to investigate the relationships between the utilisation and status of coastal dolphin populations and the health of estuaries. We will:

• Assess the abundance, trends and residency patterns of dolphin populations in these major estuarine systems of Northern New South Wales;

• Identify habitats and prey species of critical importance to resident dolphin populations;

• Examine the health of resident populations of dolphins utilizing major estuaries using assessments of external features from photographs and samples from stranded animals;

•  Investigate the relationships between estuarine condition from water quality monitoring data and the status of dolphin communities;

• Provide for more informed management plans and ensure more effective conservation initiatives.

To achieve this, three key estuarine systems in Northern New South Wales have been selected as study sites; Tweed River, Richmond River and Nambucca River.  

How will your funds be used?

We need your support to help with the costs:

• getting our boat on the water for surveys
• helping to get us to stranded animals and analyse samples from these animals to test for toxicology and pathology
• providing information and education materials to the community

We are an independent organisation and not government or university funded. We rely on the support of the community to fund this much-needed work - that is for the benefit of both the human and dolphin communities.

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