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Australian and New Zealand Rock Lobster is a high value product that has strong recognition in their local and export markets. There is significant capital investment across the combined jurisdictions of the Trans-Tasman lobster fisheries. As with most other wild caught fisheries and seafood sectors Trans-Tasman lobster fisheries face similar challenges in regards to, sustainability, threats to / competition for the resource and resource access, product quality and food safety, implications from aquaculture production and applying and taking advantage of new and emerging technologies. In addition to these common industry issues, lobster fisheries produce a product that is predominantly for live export which adds further challenges such as barriers to trade and trade agreements, complex supply chains and understanding the ‘what and where’ of new market opportunities.

Well organised and educational forums such as Trans-Tasman Rock Lobster Congresses enable a sharing of information and a collaborative approach to addressing challenges and sharing successes. Since first being held in 1999 the biennial Rock Lobster conferences have become the pre-eminent forum for the respective Trans-Tasman lobster industries to consider and address the many challenges across the supply chain. There is never a shortage of key issues and topics to address and bring together in a common theme to deliver a successful Trans-Tasman Industry Congress that has the support of all the key industry bodies and wider stakeholders.

The history of successful Trans-Tasman Industry Congresses, speaks for itself.
Trans-Tasman Congresses have well established support of all the key industry bodies and wider stakeholder interests with all lobster producing jurisdictions having now hosted an event. This history combined with the experience, existing contacts, establishing themes, producing engaging programmes, having informative exhibitions, attracting quality keynote speakers - both local and international, continuing sponsorship from service providers and the ability to attract the general support of industry ensure there is a pool of support and knowledge to deliver successful congresses

Initial Contributions (2023):
• Total combined initial contributions will be to a maximum of $30,000.00.
• Request a cash contribution from the NZRLIC.
• Request a contribution from the Eastern Rock Lobster Industry.
• Contribution from the SRL IPA.
• Contribution from the WRL IPA.

Proposed Governance Arrangements:
• The Managing Entity (ME) i.e. the industry body responsible for administering the congress in a particular year, will be responsible for holding and managing the ‘kitty’ of funds.
• ‘Surplus’ funds will be used to fund the administration, hosting and attendance of any planning meetings conducted in the ‘interim year’, this process will be managed by the ME responsible for hosting the most recent (past) Trans Tasman Congress.
• PI & Co-Investigators will discuss and confirm the amount required for future initial contributions.

PROJECT NUMBER • 2023-052

PROJECT STATUS:

CURRENT

Novel fishery independent, biological and economic-processing methods to underpin expansion of Australia's fastest growing fishery, the Western Rock Octopus

ORGANISATION:

Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) Hillarys

TAGS

Rac Wa

Economic

SPECIES

Octopuses

PROJECT NUMBER • 2021-017

PROJECT STATUS:

CURRENT

Basement Jacks - Where's your stock at? Understanding stock structure and connectivity of Mangrove Jack in northern Australia

ORGANISATION:

Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (NT)

TAGS

SPECIES

PROJECT NUMBER • 2022-146

PROJECT STATUS:

CURRENT

Animal Welfare – what we do know and where to from here?

ORGANISATION:

McPhee Research Consultants Pty Ltd

TAGS

PROJECT NUMBER • 2021-007

PROJECT STATUS:

CURRENT

Toolbox for the estimation of fish population abundance

ORGANISATION:

CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere Hobart

TAGS

Developing automated data cleansing and validation processes for fisheries catch and effort data

Project number: 2017-085

Project Status:

Current

Budget expenditure: $397,750.00

Principal Investigator: Karina C. Hall

Organisation: Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (NSW)

Project start/end date: 21 Dec 2017 - 29 Jun 2020

Contact:

FRDC

TAGS

Need

During a recent national Fisheries Statistics Working Group meeting, data managers from all Australian states highlighted and discussed the likely high prevalence of inaccurate or fraudulent data supplied by fishers and accrued through data-entry errors. Current data quality control measures in each jurisdiction are largely heterogeneous, undocumented and often rely on manual checks by clerks or analysts that are labour intensive and costly and not routinely executed. Because many of these checks occur during manual data entry of paper-based records, these are likely to become obsolete as reliance on electronic reporting increases, with data entered directly by fishers through online portals or mobile applications.

There is a need to develop automated data cleansing and diagnostic procedures that can be applied post-hoc or retrospectively to large fisheries databases to detect and flag errors and outliers and provide subsets of reliable catch and effort data for stock assessments and other analyses. This project will contribute towards addressing these issues, by developing automated processes to routinely assess newly entered fisheries catch and effort data for errors, retrospectively quantify error rates in existing data and assess their likely influence on the outputs of stock assessment analyses. The outcomes will help improve the quality and accuracy of catch and effort data used in routine stock assessments, and in turn lead to more sustainable management of wild capture fisheries resources.

Objectives

1. Review existing data quality control and cleansing processes applied to fisheries catch and effort databases in all state and commonwealth jurisdictions.

2. Develop a suite of generic algorithmic and statistical approaches to detect and flag different error types (e.g., anomalous, missing and outlying values) in fisheries catch and effort relational databases.

3. Trial the above approaches with several case-study fisheries datasets to assess the performance of different data cleansing approaches, quantify error rates and types and assess the sensitivity of catch and effort statistics to these errors and outliers.

4. On the basis of the above findings, recommend a standard national approach for data cleansing and validation of fisheries catch and effort data.

5. Customise and integrate the generic approaches into NSW fisheries database systems to implement automated data cleansing processes.

6. Extend the results of the project to fishers and industry representatives to encourage greater accuracy in fisheries catch and effort data reporting.