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Australian fisheries, including trawl fisheries, need to ensure they met legislative requirements to ensure they have no unacceptable impacts on ecosystems. Similarly, the marine ecosystems and its biodiversity need to be conserved and protected. This project links across sustainability and conservation management objectives by building and extending previous works such as FRDC 2003-021 and FRDC 2016-039, works that provide/establish regional and national regionally relevant clarification of the seabed mapping and landscape-scale fishing footprints, and exposure and protection of demersal assemblages with respect to trawling.
Although significant bycatch data are available (mostly for fishes) for some trawl grounds in the region, such data are needed broadly across the study area (including for invertebrates) and there is almost no information on the distribution and abundance of habitats and sensitive habitat-forming benthos. Currently, this lack of adequate biological data is an impediment to completing bycatch and habitat ERAs for these priority areas. Thus, a pre-requisite need is to survey these areas for distribution and abundance of sensitive habitats and bycatch species.
This project will then fill the existing gaps and needs in the southern portion of QLD and north-eastern of NSW with new data & methods and new risk-based management assessments to implement a consistent spatial approach for the conservation management of demersal assemblages applying to all continental shelf trawl fisheries. This will be done in collaboration with researchers in each State, industry and commonwealth managers.
This project proposes to conduct the required distribution and abundance surveys, and then assess whether sensitive habitats and bycatch species are at substantive risk from trawling. If necessary, the project would also evaluate risk-management options that may be proposed, using an objective MSE-type approach. Methods and outputs proposed herein would be comparable with those from the previous GBR Seabed Project (FRDC 2003-021). Previous sampling in the GBR, southern Queensland and northern NSW, would be taken into account.