Assessment of the effects of fishing and its environmental impacts are key research areas identified as high priority for Australia’s fisheries management and funding agencies. Australian fisheries are now being required to demonstrate their environmental sustainability through an Environment Australia assessment process. This requirement is being driven by new legislation such as the EPBC Act and by industry through the need for meeting standards for certification e.g. accreditation by the Marine Stewardship Council.
To date there has been no study of the effects of trawling on the seabed invertebrate communities in the NPF. A CSIRO-QDPI study of the impacts of trawling on inter-reef seabed communities in the northern GBR (Poiner et al. 1998) showed that in inter-reefal areas, trawling caused an overall depletion of seabed fauna of between 5 to 20% for each trawl and the effect was cumulative. However, this inter-reef seabed is not typical of most prawn trawl grounds, which are muddier and have a different fauna. The CSIRO-QDPI study recommended that a future study should quantify the response of soft-sediment fauna to trawl disturbance. This proposal aims to do this and addresses NPF High Priority Research Areas: Effects of fishing (improved efficiency in fishing gear and techniques in order to reduce bycatch and discarding and environmental impacts on the benthos).
Some sectors of society recognize prawn trawling as one of the main extractive activities in tropical seabed areas of Australia, and there is an increased pressure to limit its perceived impacts. However, if these practices are to continue, how do we ensure that the effects of trawling on the seabed are sustainable? It is imperative to evaluate conservation and management options for the seabed and develop indicators for the status of the seabed and impacts of the fishery. In order to achieve this, we need to know:

-The fine-scale spatial extent of the fishing effort within the NPF
-The mortality rates of different species of seabed fauna under different fishing impact intensities.
-The rate of recovery of impacted seabed fauna.
-The likely response of the seabed fauna under different management options.
This project will address these questions. The compilation and mapping of the available VMS data will provide an accurate depiction of the overall combined fishing effort over the whole of the fishing grounds. The repeat trawl experiment will provide estimates of trawl-induced mortality rates of various seabed fauna. The recovery of these species will be monitored at 6-monthly intervals for 2 years after the repeat trawl experiment. These data will be incorporated into the Trawl Impacts Model and the responses of seabed fauna to a variety of management options will be modeled. Data derived in this project will enable us to increase confidence in the outputs of the model and provide more soundly based advice to managers. However, a future complimentary project to characterise the seabed fauna over broader geographic regions, including a range of fishing effort would be needed to increase and expand our confidence in the predictions from the model for the whole of the NPF.

It has been suggested that the use of hoppers in prawn trawl fisheries can minimise the effects on bycatch species. Preliminary results from both the Queensland pilot study and research in SA’s Spencer Gulf Prawn trawl fishery support these suggestions. The uptake of hoppers in Australian prawn trawl fisheries is increasing, however, a coordinated and cooperative research approach to quantitatively determine the effects of hoppers has not been attempted.NORMAC’s Bycatch Action Plan has identified research into the effects of hoppers on bycatch survival as a ‘high priority’. The East Coast Trawl Plan also includes the need to reduce bycatch by 40% by 2005 and flags that hoppers could assist achieve this target. SARDI have proposed that hoppers, used as part of a suite of bycatch mitigation devices, could improve bycatch survival.

In recent years, the environmental performance of the fishing industry, in general, and more visible sectors like bay and inlet fisheries in particular, has come under increasing scrutiny. Concurrently, a number of initiatives have or are being implemented that directly address this environmental performance. These include SCFA's framework for implementation of ESD in Australia's fisheries, changes to Schedule 4 of the Wildlife Protection Act and the new Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, Seafood Services Australia initiatives, eco-labelling such as the Marine Stewardship Council, and environmental management planning at more local levels.

With the success of the buy-out removing most of the latent and part time operators from bay and inlet fisheries, it is critical that those fishers who chose to remain in the industry take proactive steps that will ensure their security of tenure in the fishery and certainty for the resource they harvest and the environment they operate in.

As a first step towards this goal, the Bay and Inlet fishers held an Industry workshop in July 2000 to identify and discuss the issues that need to be addressed to ensure their fisheries have a sustainable future. After that meeting an application was made to FRDC for funding to facilitate the progression towards Environmental certification for the Bay and Inlets fisheries. That application was unsuccessful. Since then bay and inlet fishers have canvassed many options for resourcing an EMS process for their fishery cumulating in another workshop held at Welshpool in October 2001 and the forming of an all encompassing state bay and inlet fishery association, Eco-Fish Victoria.

Although the fisheries in the bays and inlet are managed separately, and there are separate industry/regional associations, the issues confronting industry are common to all bays and inlets. Consequently, industry members agreed that these issues should be dealt with on a state-wide basis through establishing one industry body to facilitate the development and implementation of EMS’s for Victorian bay and inlet fishers. That new Industry association will have a close affiliation with SIV

Importantly the Victorian bay and inlet sector of industry have reached a consensus regarding hard decisions for a sustainable future for them and their fishery. Their commitment is to ensure all fishery activities measure-up against best practice when it comes to managing the resource, by-catch, habitat and the marine environment.