Stock Assessment remains a key component of fisheries management. The pool of Australian scientists that practice in this field is well respected globally. However, this community is generally dispersed, both in terms of organisational structure and geography. Opportunities to share skills and common issues on a regular basis, including discussions on new developments in the field, are often lacking. Previous projects on stock assessors’ use of bespoke models versus packages have shown that lack of knowledge of available off-the-shelf packages and their specifications was a key roadblock to adoption of these methods. The new Stock Assessment Toolbox web-site (toolbox.frdc.com.au) goes some way to address this issue by providing a single repository for globally developed packages. Another barrier was knowledge on how to use these packages, which was partially addressed through subsequent courses on data-limited methods and the Stock Synthesis assessment framework. Although these incorporated advances in the field, there is still a large gap in terms of adoption – not only of packages but of new techniques, sharing our own advances with the world and vice versa. There is a need to understand the influencers (both human and in terms of scientific practices) in this field, both in Australia, and from the international world into Australia. This requires bringing past projects together and adding new skills to fisheries assessors to facilitate and further a strong sense of connection and a community of practice within the field, and with other related fields. This work is aimed at helping assessors gain and share skill and knowledge amongst each other through understanding their impediments and drivers. The project will create a roadmap for the next generation of assessors and methods.

Although the use of data and analytics is becoming more widespread across agricultural industries and institutions, the sector is held back by the lack of a consolidated data platform that combines multiple data sets from multiple data sources in real time. Other technology
and data challenges compromising the strength of the Australian agriculture industry include:

Businesses often need to access multiple data systems/datasets which are stored across various platforms and functions and are not well integrated. Aggregating and reconciling these datasets require manual intervention, is rife with errors/duplication and require significant effort to ensure uptake across the business in order to lead to tangible analytics outcomes. This interoperability challenge is commonplace across the industry today.

Data is not shared between the various stakeholders within the industry at times leading to analysis been taken place with incomplete datasets and other times for duplication of efforts with varying results. Data sharing/collaborating culture which would be backed by an established data governance framework including protocols/policies for data access, privacy, definition and standards, would uplift the industry analytical capabilities.

Challenges in understanding where to prioritise efforts to best support the industry. With significant opportunities for data-driven use cases across the value chain, defining the prioritisation of funding and efforts to build capabilities is a critical challenge for industry bodies and governments. The OzAg DX could enable consolidated, integrated and standardised data, to help reduce the labour intensive effort of collecting and analysing data to make better informed prioritisation decisions on deployment of limited support resources and capabilities.

A slow take up of digital technologies is slowing agricultural productivity growth. As Australia looks to achieve the target of $100 billion farm gate output by 2030, digital agriculture is expected to contribute up to an additional $20 billion annually to the gross value of agricultural production.