Fisheries Managers often need to rapidly explore possible impacts of a range of potential changes to a fishery (for example, changes in fuel and fish prices, biophysical, environmental and economic drivers of the fishery, and alternative fisheries management regulations). Unfortunately, the preparation and implementation time involved in an end-to-end ecosystem modeling project (e.g. the Alternative Management strategies for commonwealth fisheries) means that delivery time is typically years (likely 3-4 years) at a potential cost of millions. This is simply too slow to be of use to many of the rapid turn around questions management bodies are presented with. However, the decisions that need to be made would benefit from system-level strategic information if it were available; and fisheries managers and other stakeholders, including the fishing industry, would gain significant insights into the fishery from the ability to explore such changes without the need to undertake specific research projects.

To this end the best approach is to preemptively create a library of runs that span a large number of potential management strategies and scenarios of interest and to have it to hand as an accessible data source through a user-friendly interface that can be explored from the user’s desktop. This need has been identified by key stakeholders, like the AFMA managers and lead to the ComFRAB call for this project. In the short term this tool is best developed and applied around a library of runs set up for southeastern waters and the SESSF, but the benefit can be much broader than that – both in terms of creating a framework for future use with other Atlantis (or multispecies) model output and indirectly by providing a way of interrogating a complex marine system to gain general insights into their function and implications of different forms of management.

The south-eastern waters of Australia are predicted to be the most vulnerable area to global change, due to changes in East Australian, Leeuwin and Flinders Currents and associated increases in water temperatures; modification of local ocean processes, like coastal upwelling; sea-level rise driven threats to inshore habitats, which have critical fish nursery roles; and other threats to inshore habitats posed by simultaneous increases in salinity, river flow and stratification of shallow water bodies. Together these shifts will impact species composition of functional groups and communities in the region. Moreover it will affect the sustainability of the fisheries (commercial and recreational) and aquaculture resources, which will have social and economic flow-on effects for the businesses and communities; particularly as they will be exacerbated by changes in market conditions, input costs and food prices as global change affects consumer purchasing behaviour changes. This means there is a strong need for information that casts light on exposure and vulnerability of the region and identifies robust management and adaptation strategies. Major benefits will only be achieved if there is a means of synthesising information across all topics (ecological, economic and social) to provide system level quantitative assessments and insights. This requires a method that can easily address changing socially and economically driven human behaviour, environments, ecological components, productivity and distributions and cross-jurisdictional human activities and management. Atlantis is uniquely placed in that it can directly address all of these critical factors. The SEAP program can also benefit from the years of development that have resulted in a working Atlantis model for the SE region.