Marine Protected Areas

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• Lord Howe Island Marine Park (Commonwealth Waters) Management Plan (PDF - 1362 KB)
• Figure 1: Location of the Lord Howe Island Marine Park (Commonwealth Waters) and zoning arrangements (PDF - 68 KB)

About this Management plan

Lying at 31º30'S latitude, some 700 km north-east of Sydney (Figure 1), Lord Howe Island and Ball's Pyramid are part of a chain of seamounts that are the remnants of a once-extensive volcanic system active in the late Miocene (McDougall et al. 1981). The waters of Lord Howe Island are renowned for their clarity, relatively high coral and algae cover and high biodiversity due to the combination of tropical and sub-tropical fauna. The conservation significance of the region is recognised by its inclusion on Australia's Register of the National Estate in 1978 and the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1982. Examples of World Heritage values of the Lord Howe Island group specific to the marine environment include:

• the unusual combination of tropical and temperate taxa of marine flora and fauna, including many species at their distributional limits, reflecting the extreme latitude of the coral reef ecosystems which comprise the southernmost true coral reef in the world;
• the diversity of marine benthic algae species, including at least 235 species of which 12 per cent are endemic (species not found elsewhere);
• the diversity of marine fish species, including at least 500 species of which 400 are inshore species and 15 are endemic; and
• the diversity of marine invertebrate species, including more than 83 species of corals and 65 species of echinoderms of which 70 per cent are tropical, 24 per cent are temperate and 6 per cent are endemic (Nomination of the Lord Howe Island Group 1981).