Victorian recreational lobster catches are increasing in many areas due to a range of issues including population growth in coastal communities and efforts to promote fishing through initiatives such as "Target 1 million". Understanding these catches which in some areas is on par with commercial catches is critical for sustainable management of the fishery (for both sectors) and informing resource allocation discussions. The Victorian Fisheries Authority (VFA) has been conducting a recreational tagging program to estimate recreational southern rock lobster catches for the last two seasons. Uptake and compliance with tagging has been high, however reporting of tag usage has been more problematic with the fate of 30,419 of the 92,326 tags issued in the first (2017/18) season remaining unknown. This project will run a recreational diary/phone survey (as used in Tasmania) in parallel with the upcoming 2019/20 tagging season to calibrate the tagging program and provide a comparison of the methods. This will enable a calibration of the tagging based catch estimate and guide management as to the future applicability of both methods.

Incorporating recreational catch estimates in stock assessment models remains challenging due to i) a lack of catch estimates prior to the commencement of surveys and ii) potential reporting biases in survey results. This project will develop a protocol for incorporating recreational catch estimates in a robust manner that specifically addresses these concerns and is aimed at increasing model accuracy and robustness to future changes in recreational catch whilst promoting stakeholder confidence in the utilised approach.

A disadvantage of conventional tagging systems is the requirement of issuing plastic tags and the consequent costs and environmental impacts. In consultation with VFA and stakeholders this project will investigate alternative smart-phone based 'tagging' systems that avoid this issue and develop a guide for future implementation of such a system.

Integration of recreational fishing (RF) into harvest strategies (HS) is necessary for many fisheries in Australia, to account for catches that can equal or exceed commercial catch for some key species and to address biological and experiential objectives of the RF sector. Both the Productivity Commission’s report Marine Fisheries and Aquaculture (2016) and the ICES Report from the Working Group Recreational Fishing Surveys (2018) recommend formal integration of RF into stock assessments and harvest strategies. Failure to do so puts sustainable management goals and legislated state and Commonwealth fisheries requirements at risk.

Equitable and quantitative inclusion of RF in harvest strategies is rare. This stems from a traditional focus on the commercial sector and budgetary challenges involved with representatively sampling RF. It is therefore unclear: 1) what types of RF data and monitoring best service stock assessments, (2) which data also track indicators of recreational objectives (often related to the fishing experience), and (3) how to integrate harvest strategy components for multiple sectors. The need to address these knowledge gaps was highlighted by the FRDC priority research call in 2018 - “Integrating recreational fishery data into harvest strategies for multi-sector fisheries in New South Wales”. NSW provides an important test case for addressing issues around RF integration that are faced by most jurisdictions.

Harvest strategy development for multi-sector fisheries requires a transparent and defensible process due to complexities in addressing diverse objectives and apprehension among stakeholder groups. Structured workshops that use easily-understandable, interactive decision support tools and involve independent experts and stakeholder representatives are likely to provide best outcomes. ‘FishPath’ is a leading harvest strategy decision support tool and “bottom up” engagement philosophy that allows experts and stakeholders to interactively contribute to harvest strategy development in a transparent workshop setting. However, it requires additional development in recreational and multi-sector contexts.