The design and implementation of an integrated, long-term bycatch monitoring program has not been undertaken in any Australian prawn trawl fishery. The diversity and complexity of bycatch issues in most of these fisheries means that designing such a program is a significant challenge. The Northern Prawn Fishery (NPF) has been proactive in its support of research aimed at ensuring ecological sustainability, particularly regarding bycatch. This has shown significant benefit during the 'road tests' of EA's strategic assessment guidelines, with the NPF one of the few fisheries with a risk assessment of bycatch (FRDC 1996/257). The risk assessment highlighted species that were at highest risk from trawling, and there is now a need to take the next step and collect information on these species to determine the actual extent of this risk. There has also been a substantial amount of research evaluating the most suitable monitoring methods for this fishery. There is now a clear need to draw this information together in the design, trial and implementation of a monitoring program. This will be done in consultation with management, industry and other stakeholders. The program will then be handed over to NORMAC and AFMA for the long-term.
The NPF Bycatch Act ion Plan has committed to bycatch monitoring and a trial of a trained crew-member observer scheme for bycatch. Monitoring is needed in order for NORMAC to report against the commitments made in the BAP. This research also addresses NORMAC's high priori ty research area of the Effects of Fishing. It specifically addresses the priorities of assessing bycatch, ensuring the sustainability of bycatch and the development of monitoring programs for BRDs under commercial conditions. This research forms part o f an overall ecosystem management plan for the NPF and is critical to fulfilling NORMAC’s commitments in the NPF BAP and addressing the guidelines of EA's strategic assessment. The project also addresses FRDC Effects of Trawling subprogram priorities reg arding bycatch: “Methods for measuring and monitoring bycatch and the quantification of the direct impacts on associated populations and communities of bycatch species”.
The proposed project will address a range of issues currently faced by Australian f isheries, including
(i) how to establish a long term monitoring program for non-target species;
(ii) how the industry can best measure its impact on bycatch species;
(iii) how to increase industry’s ability to provide validated and high quality data on non-target species, that are acceptable to all stakeholders.
This project will provide the NPF with a cost effective process to demonstrate to the Australian and international community its willingness and ability to monitor its impacts on the species gr oups of most concern. This is an important step that will also have to be made by other Australian fisheries. We anticipate that the experiences gained and processes implemented during this project may be transferred to other fisheries. Consequently, it is hoped that there will be far-reaching benefits to the wider community arising from the projects completion.

Data from conventional tagging experiments have been and are becoming increasingly important for providing estimates of mortality rates in the stock assessment of large pelagic fishery resources as they provide a powerful, and perhaps only, alternative to relying on CPUE indices of abundance. There is an extensive scientific literature on tag-recapture experiments; however, a comprehensive framework for the analysis and design of tagging experiments in the pelagic fishery context does not exist. This has meant that in the design phase of tagging experiments, it has not been possible to provide scientifically rigorous advice on matters such as the relative tradeoffs between the number of tags to release, the spatial/temporal distribution of tags and the levels of observer coverage (required for estimation of reporting rates and for estimating the size/age distribution of the commercial catches). In addition, a comprehensive analysis of the extensive data from past SBT tagging experiments (particularly those conducted in the 1990s) taking into account all of the major potential sources of heterogeneity has not been completed because of the lack of a comprehensive estimation framework. Thus, the full benefit of the large research investment from these experiments has not been realized. It is also anticipated that conventional tagging programs will be a major future source of assessment information in both the eastern and western tuna fisheries. As such, an appropriate framework for the design and analysis of tagging experiments is needed to ensure that the full value from both past and future experiments is realized. Finally, there is increasing data accumulating from archival tags. There is a need to understand the role, and the relative cost/benefits, that archival tags can contribute to the overall estimation of mortality rates to past and future conventional tagging experiments.

Management decisions should be based on good quality data. Any steps taken to improve an inadequate baseline will eventually improve data quality and the subsequent cost effectiveness of obtaining these data. Any part of the baseline where confusion can arise should be identified and improved as soon as possible. The fisheries coding system knees to be enhanced to improve its functionality to clarify names and assist users when obtaining or vetting fish data. It will also prove an important baseline for a variety of other industry uses. The resources are presently available to improve this baseline and these may not be available in the future. It also coincides with a period of activity whereby the names our seafood will be standardised and legislated. The project is timely and should be completed now.

In addition to the commercial fishing industry, fish names are frequently referred to by an extremely broad variety of groups including administrators, aquarists, editors, educators, lawyers, legislators, recreational fishermen, scientists, seafood consumers and writers. The need for a standard list of common names of Australian fishes was eloquently flagged by eminent Australian scientist, Gilbert Whitley, some thirty years ago (see attached excerpt from his paper, appendix 4). A national nomenclatural standard covering all Australian fishes is long overdue - no such standard presently exists for secondary commercial any bycatch species. CAAB has now been adopted as the industry wide coding system but would be considerably more useful if it contained standardised common name information and an image of each species.

The unavailability or inconsistency use of common names of fish has created a problem for all sectors of the seafood industry. It has also led to serious confusion when interpreting catch return sheets and fisheries data based on common names. Even the guidelines of this application form (ie Project title and identification) request the use of the approved marketing mane of each species. However, most secondary commercial and almost all bycatch species have not been allocated a single approved common name.

Whereas the process of establishing single names for the main commercial species has been contentious, it is likely to be much simpler for the remaining fishes. If approached properly, the task only needs to be done once. The final product should be definitive work on the common names of Australian fishes requiring minimal alteration in the future.

The recently published Australian Seafood Handbook has created many enquiries from governmental and commercial groups wanting to gain access to images held in the CSIRO fish image library. However, in it s present form, this image collection cannot be accessed cost effectively.. The bulk of the collection is in celluloid format and the digital component has bot been assigned to a search and retrieval oriented database. Hence, it is presently grossly under utilised. A logical step is to digitise the collection and make the images freely available on the CAAB website, simultaneously improving accessibility and making CAAB more user friendly.