FRDC and CSIRO have agreed that a more strategic leadership role between the two agencies to deal with issues of strategic importance would be of great benefit to all involved in Australia’s fishery sectors. This is not intended to be an exclusive relationship and other research providers will be invited to participate.

Two strategic issues, that have been raised, implicitly and explicitly, as priorities by stakeholders and are identified in the PISC R D&E strategy for fishing and aquaculture and FRDC’s current strategic plan, are:
— Social licence to operate implications for industry and management, and
— Implications of changing governance and regulatory frameworks on economic, social and ecological outcomes
Each issue has significant implications for ongoing sustainability, management effectiveness, industry viability and societal views of the industry and its management. Both issues present significant research challenges - not the least being defining the body of work that is required to address them.
This proposal is for a small scoping study that will develop research plans to address both issues.
The purpose of the joint activity between CSIRO and FRDC is to get ahead of the game: to invest in research that takes a proactive approach to tomorrow’s opportunities and issues for fisheries management. The project will focus on wild capture fisheries, both recreational and commercial. It will take a ‘whole of system’ approach integrating across social, economic, environmental and governance considerations.

Under Commonwealth harvest policy, fisheries are to be managed to maximise economic performance. Most Commonwealth fisheries have/ are developing harvest strategies based on an MEY target and TAC controls. Following Ministerial Direction, the NPF is to adopt an ITQ management system from mid-2012. This transition requires: 1.reliable methods for predicting the total sustainable, available catch; and, 2, understanding of the economics of the fishery, providing for setting total allowable catches (TACs) that maximise value rather than catch. This project addresses these components. Unlike the NPF tiger prawn fishery, the fishery for common banana prawns (CBP), in which annual catches vary dramatically, has not been amenable to assessment and predictive modelling, as recruitment varies markedly with environmental conditions.

Fishermen have known for many years that banana prawns catches depend upon rainfall. Considerable research has explored the ecology behind this e.g. relationships between rainfall and catches of CBP, (Vance et al. 1985), emigration of CBP from estuaries as salinity decreases (Staples 1980, Staples and Vance 1986, Vance et al. 1998), temperature and wind (Vance et al. (2003)) and the effect of fishing effort (Venables and Poloczanska 2006). Venables et al. (2011) explored the feasibility of predicting the fishery-wide potential annual catch for CBP. In a manner suitable for TAC-development, it uses information available before the fishery begins each year. The second component follows the successful incorporation of economic objectives into the harvest strategy for tiger and endeavour prawns (Dichmont et al. 2008) and would redress the lack of suitable techniques for TAC-setting for CBP, as noted in FRDC 2007-018 (Dichmont et al. 2010). The process is relatively simplified in this case, as there is no large interdependence in the fishery and economic modelling entailed.