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Tactical Research Fund: Incorporation of predictive models of banana prawn catch for MEY-based harvest strategy development for the Northern Prawn Fishery

Project number: 2011-239
Project Status:
Completed
Budget expenditure: $58,000.00
Principal Investigator: Rik C. Buckworth
Organisation: CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere Hobart
Project start/end date: 13 May 2012 - 29 Nov 2012
Contact:
FRDC

Need

Under Commonwealth harvest policy, fisheries are to be managed to maximise economic performance. Most Commonwealth fisheries have/ are developing harvest strategies based on an MEY target and TAC controls. Following Ministerial Direction, the NPF is to adopt an ITQ management system from mid-2012. This transition requires: 1.reliable methods for predicting the total sustainable, available catch; and, 2, understanding of the economics of the fishery, providing for setting total allowable catches (TACs) that maximise value rather than catch. This project addresses these components. Unlike the NPF tiger prawn fishery, the fishery for common banana prawns (CBP), in which annual catches vary dramatically, has not been amenable to assessment and predictive modelling, as recruitment varies markedly with environmental conditions.

Fishermen have known for many years that banana prawns catches depend upon rainfall. Considerable research has explored the ecology behind this e.g. relationships between rainfall and catches of CBP, (Vance et al. 1985), emigration of CBP from estuaries as salinity decreases (Staples 1980, Staples and Vance 1986, Vance et al. 1998), temperature and wind (Vance et al. (2003)) and the effect of fishing effort (Venables and Poloczanska 2006). Venables et al. (2011) explored the feasibility of predicting the fishery-wide potential annual catch for CBP. In a manner suitable for TAC-development, it uses information available before the fishery begins each year. The second component follows the successful incorporation of economic objectives into the harvest strategy for tiger and endeavour prawns (Dichmont et al. 2008) and would redress the lack of suitable techniques for TAC-setting for CBP, as noted in FRDC 2007-018 (Dichmont et al. 2010). The process is relatively simplified in this case, as there is no large interdependence in the fishery and economic modelling entailed.

Objectives

1. Investigate the use of robust statistical methods to stabilise and improve the performance of the catch prediction model of Venables et al. (2011) against historical catches
2. Calculate estimates of uncertainty for the catch prediction model
3. Investigate retrospective and prospective analyses, examining how the predictive models would have performed in recent years, including 2012.
4. Investigate refinements to the spatial scale and other structural aspects of the model
5. Develop economic indicators of dependence between catch and price, and price elasticity for banana prawns
6. Develop an MEY analysis for the common banana prawn fishery
Industry
PROJECT NUMBER • 2016-060
PROJECT STATUS:
COMPLETED

Healthcheck Phase 2

Sustainability is a broad and complex concept, and consideration of the diverse suite of factors involved in social, economic, ecological and governance arrangements is needed to create truly sustainable food production industries. Australian fisheries encompasses a much broader range of issues than...
ORGANISATION:
CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere Hobart
Environment
PROJECT NUMBER • 1995-015
PROJECT STATUS:
COMPLETED

Estimation of population parameters for Australian prawn fisheries

One of the main objectives of fisheries management is to ensure the sustainability of fished stocks. To reach this objective scientists have to adequately assess the status of fished populations with quantitative models of the fishery systems. Most of these models require estimates of population...
ORGANISATION:
CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere Hobart
Environment
PROJECT NUMBER • 2014-039
PROJECT STATUS:
COMPLETED

Review and assess stock assessment methods used in Australia

Stock assessments provide scientific advice in support of fisheries decision making. They involve fitting population dynamics models to fishery and monitoring data to provide estimates of time-trajectories of biomass and fishing mortality in absolute terms and relative to biological reference...
ORGANISATION:
CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere Hobart
Environment
PROJECT NUMBER • 2016-023
PROJECT STATUS:
COMPLETED

Sentinel sensors: revolutionising our understanding and management of the estuarine environment

This study, undertaken by CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, examines the usefulness of mussels as sentinels for environmental change using a novel biosensor. This project measured the vital signs of heart rate and behaviour in sentinel animals, as they respond to multiple and interacting changes in the...
ORGANISATION:
CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere Hobart
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