Until recently, exploitation of North West Shelf multi-species fish stocks was mainly by the Taiwanese pair-trawl fishery, though other foreign vessels had also fished there. Australian finfish fishing in the region was conducted by a small number of line-fishing boats, working close to the mainland...

The investment in this project has resulted in a substantially more extensive set of age composition data than would have otherwise been possible. This in turn has underpinned stock assessment modeling that has provided the basis for determining that the commercial fishery for snapper in Shark...