Assessment of national-scale tracking of commercially important fish species
Modelling environmental changes and effects on wild-caught species in Queensland
Identifying population connectivity of shark bycatch species in NT waters
This project is needed for three main reasons:
1. It directly addresses a NT RAC priority in the 2019 call for funding applications relating to improving sustainable yield estimates to inform stock assessment programs for undefined target species and protected species in the Offshore Net and Line Fishery. The project will support sustainable fishing practices for important commercial fisheries in the NT and the development of new commercial opportunities within these fisheries: The impacts of fishery activities on these species, either through bycatch or targeted harvest, are difficult to assess in the absence of information on population connectivity and stock structure.
2. The project will develop capacity for fisheries research and monitoring in NT waters. Genetics methods are widely applied to fisheries research and monitoring and training of an early career fisheries scientist in the application and interpretation of genetic data will be a key outcome of this project.
3. The project will provide key information to support the transition of these species from bycatch to a harvested byproduct species, including an evaluation of leading-edge genetic techniques in fisheries assessment and monitoring.
Final report
Determination of the impacts of direct harvest of coral species in northern Australia
Australia’s aquarium fisheries are high value (GVP >$20 million), small scale fisheries that rely on exporting CITES listed corals for profitability and viability. The Australian government requires fisheries collecting and exporting these species to demonstrate that their harvest is sustainable under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) in order to meet Australia's obligations under CITES.
In the absence of empirical evidence, precautionary harvest limits are set on all coral species, and monitored and reported by NT Fisheries to the Commonwealth Department of Environment and Energy (DoEE), to fulfil EPBC requirements. Increased global demand for valuable coral species presents an opportunity for licenced fishers to develop new and existing international markets. However, in order to increase harvest limits, evidence is required to reinforce that the harvest and subsequent export will not have a detrimental effect on the population status of the species (CITES non-detriment finding). Any supporting non-detriment finding must be corroborated with new empirical evidence on the impacts of harvesting corals.
The FRDC project ‘Establishing baselines and assessing vulnerability of commercially harvested corals across northern Australia’ (FRDC 2014-029) (currently underway) attempts to address some of these issues including taxonomy, abundance and distribution of key coral species but fails to address the long-standing concern of the impacts of coral harvesting. Understanding and quantifying the impacts of harvesting coral has the potential for providing the greatest benefit to industry. The specific need is to investigate the extent of recovery (or not) of key species of Scleractinian (hard) corals harvested at the level of individual colonies over an appropriate temporal scale.
Members of the A12 Aquarium display fishery are supportive of this project and will be actively involved in assisting with data collection. This project directly addresses the NT Research Advisory Committee priority ‘Impact of harvesting key species of Scleractinian (hard) corals in the Northern Territory’.