eReefs

A modelling and monitoring system for the Great Barrier Reef that simulates water movement, sediment, waves and biogeochemistry from the river 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.

The partners are the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, CSIRO, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Queensland Government.⁵ Observations come through the Integrated Marine Observing System and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, and the Australian Government's Reef Trust funds the program.³

The models cover the reef from the end of the river catchments and estuaries through the reef lagoon to the open ocean.^1,5 The suite has hydrodynamic, sediment, wave and biogeochemical models: the hydrodynamic ones compute how water moves, and the biogeochemical ones follow nutrients and living matter in the water.⁴ The main runs are the GBR4 and GBR1 regional models.² RECOM lets a user configure a small local model nested inside the regional results.² The other main line of work is satellite ocean-colour remote sensing: reading what the water holds from its colour as seen from orbit.⁴

The program has run since 2012, and was funded under the Reef 2050 Long-Term Sustainability Plan and the Reef 2050 Water Quality Improvement Plan.¹ With the Paddock to Reef and Marine Monitoring programs, it tracks where sediments and nutrients from land-based runoff end up, and its conditions feed programs on bleaching, crown-of-thorns starfish control and reef restoration.¹ eReefs lists 111 peer-reviewed publications.² The site shows current conditions on the reef, and the modelling team presented at the 2025 Australian Coral Reef Society conference.^1,4

Datasets from eReefs observing and modelling are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence and may be reused in other products.^2,3 Software is released as open source wherever possible, including the modelling software, CSIRO EMS, and emsarray, a Python library for reading its results.²

Data can be reached three ways:⁶

the visualisation portal
a Data Brokering Layer API, for developers to discover each product's data services
direct links to the services at the host organisations

There are also Jupyter notebooks, Python and R tutorials, and a time-series extraction tool.²