Post graduate support for novel governance for a changing ocean
Project funding will provide the PI with additional resources that enable him to focus on achieving the requirements and objectives of his research and PhD completion to a high standard and on-time.
The project funding application covers four key areas:
1. Additional stipend: to provide an adequate living allowance.
2. Travel: attendance of international conferences is a key vehicle to build skills an experience in the international policy and diplomacy fields as well as providing the opportunity to collect valuable research data. These skills and networks will ultimately benefit the Australian fishing and aquaculture community through the sharing of knowledge and networks.
3. Training: Facilitation training has been identified as an opportunity for development
4. Communication and content creation: developing content to assist with promoting and communicating the results of the research.
Having members and advocates of the Australian fishing and aquaculture community informed and skilled in the way international governance agreements are developed and then translated into domestic policy is extremely important, and a current gap in our capability and capacity.
Reviewing solutions to reduce unwanted fisher interactions with elasmobranchs
This project will build on the 2022 FRDC National Workshop on Shark Depredation (project number 2021-038) and have four complementary phases through: (1) a detailed review of the peer-reviewed and grey literature to identify and assess the efficacy of the most recently developed mitigation methods, (2) a survey of the scientific community and fishing-industry stakeholders (i.e. fishers, industry representatives, managers) to identify lesser known methods developed and/or used by fishers, (3) a series of workshops to identify the most promising approaches for mitigating depredation and plan the design of field trials, with a stop/go point occurring at the end of this phase based on whether suitable methods are found, and if so, (4) a robust experimental trial of the most promising mitigation method(s) to assess their effectiveness at reducing shark depredation. Phase 4 would be dependent on whether suitable methods can be identified through Phases 1–3. Stakeholder involvement and outreach will be a critical part of this project across all phases. The findings of this project will be widely disseminated via presentations to fishing clubs and industry members, written articles in the FRDC and fishing magazines, a final project report and subsequent peer reviewed publications. All off these outreach activities will be conducted in collaboration with the FRDC Extension Officer network. This will ensure broad adoption of the identified depredation mitigation measure(s).