National Recreational Fishing Conference bursary 2019
Developing FRDC’s 2020-2025 RD&E Plan
Industry capability and mapping report and workshop
Travel bursary: Symposium on Responsible Fishing Technology for Healthy Ecosystems and Clean Environment
Building a data-driven jurisdictional stock status reporting platform
Currently reporting processes are highly manual with exchange of documents between authors and reviewers as well as copy-editing/formatting administered by the FRDC. Automation of reports would remove these manual inefficiencies freeing up the time of FRDC, authors and reviewers alike, enabling them to focus more on the research and less on the reporting commitments of SAFS. Automation of reporting could also disrupt the current biannual timeline currently applied to SAFS. With automated reporting, jurisdictions do not require FRDC administration of the authoring process and would be able to update reports on timelines that align with other jurisdictional commitments (i.e. the production of their own status reports) - this will also enable a more timely update should stock status change. More so, jurisdictions currently undertake SAFS reporting in addition to their own jurisdictional reporting, as they are often required to report on broader issues that are consider too 'bespoke' to be considered in a national report. Automation of reports, enables jurisdictions to produce reports that align with SAFS as well as their own jurisdictional requirements in one system, streamlining the concurrent reporting processes into one reporting process. This works by ensuring that a the system is built to support reporting of fields critical for SAFS as well as fields necessary for the relevant jurisdictional reporting (FRDC then generate the SAFS reports pulling fields only relevant to SAFS whilst the jurisdictions can report more broadly by publishing the fields they require - acknowledging that bespoke jurisdictional reports would still be subject to the same rigorous peer review process of the SAFS report to ensure integrity of the reports)
Travel bursary: Sustainable Ocean Summit 2017, Canada
Progressing the National Fisheries Digital Data Framework - Industry consultation
Australian fisheries data is currently stored in a segregated manner and connectivity is minimal between sources, leaving data to be relatively inaccessible. The majority of Australia's wild catch fishers continue to complete their catch and effort reporting via paper log books that then require data entry capacity to ensure these can be utilised by the appropriate users - stock assessments, SAFS, etc... The move to electronic, real time data reporting would enable a higher level of data to be collected but would also allow fine scale management of fishing operation and ultimately greater sustainability of fish stocks.
As a result of this, corresponding jurisdictional management agency investment in improving infrastructure is also often segregated. Harmonising fisheries digital data could derive not only efficiencies in the data use (data can be collected once and used many times) but also in infrastructure investment. Harmonised investment in infrastructure as well as innovative change in regards to how a range of services and information are utilised in fishing and aquaculture could deliver greater profit and improve timeliness of decision making. It is however important that and framework proposed has the confidence and support of both government and industry. This project seeks to ensure that industry is involved in progressing the data framework, and that suit a framework suits their needs.