PROJECT NUMBER
•
2021-077
PROJECT STATUS:
CURRENT
ORGANISATION:
Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (NT)
4 results
PROJECT NUMBER
•
2021-017
PROJECT STATUS:
CURRENT
ORGANISATION:
Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (NT)
SPECIES
Determination of the impacts of direct harvest of coral species in northern Australia
Project number:
2019-070
Project Status:
Current
Budget expenditure:
$360,000.00
Principal Investigator:
Michael Usher
Organisation:
Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (NT)
Project start/end date:
31 May 2020
-
20 Aug 2023
Contact:
FRDC
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’.
1. Establish a monitoring program involving commercial fishers to determine the impacts of harvest on key coral species.
2. Improve the accuracy of coral species identification through the development of an NT identification guide.
3. Assess reproductive modes, and establish rates of recruitment for commercially important Northern Territory corals.
Film/video
FishPath: Tailoring Management to Context in Data-Limited Fisheries
Project number:
2017-125
Project Status:
Completed
Budget expenditure:
$11,600.56
Principal Investigator:
Bryan McDonald
Organisation:
Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (NT)
Project start/end date:
14 Oct 2017
-
30 Jan 2018
Contact:
FRDC
A number of fisheries in Australia are characterised as being 'small scale', 'data ' and/or 'capacity' limited (hereafter small scale fisheries). Fisheries management within the context of small scale fisheries is often ad hoc and is resource intensive relative to the value of the fishery in question. An existing project (FRDC 2015-213) is developing guidelines for low cost and systematic management of small scale fisheries. A central component of those guidelines is the FishPath tool developed by CSIRO in partnership with a global consortium of experts.
The FishPath tool has significant potential for adoption as a 'standard' approach to small scale fisheries management in Australia and has strong stakeholder by-in at a theoretical level. However, the implementation of the guidelines and the FishPath tool would benefit from testing to optimise that potential. To be effective, the tool needs to provide a framework for participatory discussions about what management, harvest strategy and longer term monitoring and assessment options are best suited to a given fishery.
As a part of the existing project, a workshop has been scheduled to occur in Darwin on November 17 2017. At that workshop, a project team that will be led by Natalie Dowling (Principal Investigator 2015-213) and Kate Crosman (Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington) plan to introduce, test and improve the FishPath tool by focusing on stakeholder input. The existing project budget will enable the workshop to proceed with NT-based stakeholders in attendance. However, the potential value of the tool in a national context warrants broader participation. This proposal seeks support to fund the participation of key stakeholders from regional areas of the Northern Territory (e.g. Gove) and around Australia to ensure broad issues are considered and outcomes are provided against national priorities to improve productivity and profitability of small scale fisheries and in assistance to the Status of Australian Fish Stocks program.
The outcomes of the workshop are regarded as essential to determining the next phase of work in the implementation of the management guidelines and FishPath nationally.
1. To test and inform the utility of FishPath from a stakeholder perspective so that it is end-user friendly and designed to have optimal value as a decision support tool
2. To provide stakeholders with an opportunity to learn about, and influence, the application of a management decision support tool designed to remove uncertainty and improve rigor particularly with regard to small scale fisheries,
3. To provide additional extension of project 2015-213 and to facilitate stakeholder-based discussions of potential future projects to improve and implement the guidelines for low cost management of small scale fisheries.
Final report
Authors:
Katherine M. Crosman
Natalie Dowling
Bryan McDonald
Final Report
•
2021-05-03
•
1.35 MB
2017-125-DLD.pdf
Fisheries are increasingly managed with involvement of fishers and other stakeholders. Stakeholders are especially critical where managers lack full knowledge of the system to be managed, resources to gather additional information, and/or resources to monitor and enforce compliance. Such ‘data-limited fisheries’ comprise more than 80% of the total global fish catch and face challenges to maintaining sustainable harvest rates. Sustainable management of data-limited fisheries may be improved by decision support that informs assessment and management choices and that is available to fishers and managers. Here we report results from a field experiment conducted with Australian fisheries stakeholders. The experiment tested FishPath, an interactive decision-support software tool for data-limited fisheries, and its influence on stakeholder buy-in to management. Participants were provided with a hypothetical fishery that mimicked commonly encountered real-world data- and capacity-limitations. In Stage 1, to establish baseline levels of buy-in, we presented participants with a shortlist of management options tailored to the fishery; participants did not interact with FishPath. In Stage 2, to test the effect of FishPath use, participants collectively input the hypothetical fishery into FishPath; the tool then presented the same management options seen in Stage 1. In Stage 3, to assess the effect of expert support, participants were randomly assigned to a control group and a treatment group after a common introduction to FishPath output. The control group explored the output without additional support, while the treatment group explored output with support from a FishPath expert. After each stage, participants were asked to rate: 1) their support for an ongoing process to select management options from the shortlist; 2) how easy or hard they expected management of the fishery to be; and 3) how effective they expected management of the fishery to be. Initial findings indicate that while FishPath use does not significantly increase stakeholder support for management (possibly due to ceiling effects, as support was high in Stage 1), it does significantly increase participants’ perceptions of the ease and effectiveness of management.
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