In many states and regions around Australia there is a lack of current and reliable recreational fisheries data (e.g. participation rates, catch) that can be used in decision-making processes. Since the stock boundaries of some recreationally-important species can span several State and Federal jurisdictions, reliable stock-specific data is needed. The results of the last national recreational fishing survey undertaken in 2000-2001 are now considered outdated in many respects, or are of limited use for rarely-caught species and some fisheries or regions due to issues of scale.

Since the national survey, various recreational fishing surveys have been undertaken by State fisheries agencies to address their own specific management issues. These surveys have generally been telephone-diary approaches based on the National survey methodology. Additionally, community-based recreational fishing data collection have been undertaken at regional levels by community and recreational fishing groups. However, there has been a lack of coordination between agencies to report at a national level. Therefore, there is a need to assess the feasibility of aggregating data from these surveys to provide reliable up-to-date information at regional and national levels.

National and international fisheries management policies require that the exploitation of fisheries resources should be conducted in a manner consistent with the principles of ecologically sustainable development, in particular the need to consider the impact of fishing activities on non-target species and the long term sustainability of the marine environment. AFMA’s Ecological Risk Management (ERM) framework details a process for assessing and progressively addressing the impacts that fisheries’ activities have on marine ecosystems based on the ecological risk assessment for the effect of fishing (ERAEF). The ERAEF, which assesses species-by-species impacts of fishing on all species encountering a particular fishing activity, is perhaps the most comprehensive assessment method supporting ecosystem-based fisheries management currently available. This method has been applied to the majority of Commonwealth fisheries, however, these assessments only take account of risk to individual species from individual Commonwealth fisheries or sub-fisheries. It is the cumulative impact from all fisheries/sub-fisheries on each individual species that determines the species’ overall sustainability. However, the cumulative risk to a species across all Commonwealth and state-managed fisheries in which it is captured cannot currently be quantified at level 2 in ERAEF, the productivity-susceptibility assessment (PSA), nor at level 3 sustainability assessment for fishing effect (SAFE) for most fisheries. A recent study shows potentially very high levels of overlap for many species across several Commonwealth fisheries, and some state-based fishery assessments have also highlighted the importance of extending the ERAEF toolbox to include a cumulative risk assessment tool. There is an urgent need to develop methods and conduct ecological risk assessments on the cumulative impact of all species encountered by multiple fisheries.