Ministerial recommendations following Strategic Assessment of the SESSF Trawl Fishery were that:

18. AFMA, in consultation with industry, EA, researchers and other stakeholders, to further assess and reduce the extent of interactions of seals, cetaceans and seabirds across all sectors of the SESSF, and interactions with syngnathids in the trawl sectors and white sharks in the gillnet and hook sector. AFMA will, for all of the above species:
• within 12 months, establish robust data collection and reporting systems to quantify the extent of interactions; and
• within 3 years assess, trial and implement as appropriate mitigation or avoidance measures including further trials of bycatch exclusion devices and spatial or temporal closures.

For seals and sea lions, AFMA will, within 18 months, extend across the trawl sectors management measures assessed as effective to help reduce interactions with seals and sea lions.

By the time you are considering whether to fund this project, the December 2004 deadline for establishment of the robust data collection and reporting system will have passed.

ISMP observer trips only cover 5% of trawl shots, so there is a lot of uncertainty about relatively rare events such as the interactions of trawl vessels with seals. Power analysis of the ISMP data revealed that to detect even a 50% decrease in the interactions with seals would require an observer program more than 7 times the current level of coverage. This would be likely to cost industry over $4 million dollars annually. If even half of industry accurately recorded their interactions with seals, it would provide a level of monitoring of this issue that would be ten times more powerful than the current ISMP coverage at a cost of 2% of independent observer coverage.

Industry can not afford to do anything other than immediately establish its own program to monitor the interactions of trawl vessels with seals. The current ISMP will be used to audit the industry-based monitoring program.

The dynamics of fish stocks are significantly influenced by environmental and oceanographic factors. Although this is now recognised by industry and scientists alike, there is increasing frustration with the application of single species stock assessments or CPUE analyses that do not incorporate any information about the broader environmental/oceanographic factors. There are clear examples in the SESSF of cyclic patterns in recruitment and availability and indications of regime shifts, but there has been little support for compiling these data and incorporating them in a quantitative manner into stock assessments of fisheries in SE Australia. Much of this information about the influence of environmental factors is in the heads of experienced fishermen but needs to be formally (and quantitatively) incorporated into the assessments/analyses that underpin the TAC setting process for the fishery. Clearly, a better understanding of the influences of the environment will improve several aspects of the assessment and management processes. Including environmental factors in the standardization of catch rates has the potential to remove a significant source of uncertainty that can lead to misleading population estimates. There is also a need to include environmental factors directly into the assessment, for example through models of environmentally-driven cycles (eg blue grenadier). As outputs from the assessments flow directly into management decisions, for example through the TAC setting process and appropriately chosen harvest strategies, the project will enhance management’s confidence in the decisions being made, and also improve industry’s faith in the assessment/management process. Industry members are currently getting disillusioned with assessments that do not take environmental factors of fishery dynamics into account to the point where they are beginning to walk out on the fishery assessment process. This only further decreases the relevance and applicability of these assessments. This trend can be turned around if industry is listened to and empowered with the capability of bringing quantitative information into the stock assessment process (rather than anecdotal).

From information passed down through generations and decades of their own experiences, good fishermen have an informed understanding of the influence of environmental and oceanographic on fish stocks. Industry and scientists would both appreciate the means to incorporate environmental/oceanographic data into the stock assessment process in a formal manner. Subsequent benefits to the management process will ensue through the provision of better developed harvest strategies that can explicitly account for environmental fluctuations in key fishery parameters (eg projections of cyclic patterns in availability and recruitment), and an exploration of flexible multi-year TACs. Also, short-term predictions of environmentally driven changes in biomass (either increases or decreases), that have led to unnecessary changes to TACs, may be offset by an increased ability to forecast biomass changes and thereby enable management to respond in a manner that does not unduly impact the stock or the financial stability of the industry. This project provides the datasets and models that would enable this to occur.

Most importantly, this project is the first step in the process of getting fishers to collect the information that is so needed to manage the fish stocks. With the burden of increasing costs of fishery monitoring, data collection and analysis, the fishing industry is looking towards cost effective alternatives to this work always being undertaken by government agencies. Industry members are already purchasing software that will enable them to collect and analyse much of this information themselves. There is a need for this to be a coordinated process which will ultimately empower the industry to bring valuable interpretations and analysis into the stock assessment process in a quantitative manner. Using the resources from this project to begin with, we aim to assess whether industry can be self-sufficient in collecting these data by the end of this three year project.

This proposal is part of a strategy co-ordinated by SEFAG and SEF Research Committee aimed at addressing the need for fishery independent survey data.

In order to address this broader need, SEFAG and SEFMAC Research Committee have identified two more immediate needs.

1. The need to build industry support for this initiative is paramount. As identified by SEF Research Committee, SEF industry members have little faith in the use of commercial catch rates as an index of abundance because they are substantially influenced by quota availability, market demands and environmental conditions. The concern that they express is that short term variability due to these factors will be interpreted and acted upon by managers as a change in actual abundance. In other countries where long-term industry-based surveys have been conducted, however, the fishery independent indices have made it possible to remove the influences of quota and market demand and quantify the impact of environmental variability on catch rates. This has made it possible, over time, to standardise survey catch rates for the impact of environmental effects. Exposing members of the SEF community to this international experience should go some way to addressing these concerns and building support.

2. If it is to succeed, there is a need to develop a cost-effective and statistically robust design for a long-term program of industry-based surveys. To build support and move towards implementation it is necessary to develop a survey design. Obviously any survey design needs to be cost-effective and capable of providing statistically robust indices of abundance. With an a agreed survey design members of the SEF community can start considering a concrete proposal for implementation and assessing the costs and benefits of proceeding with implementation.