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.