Waste to profit in urchin fisheries: developing business opportunities to ensure fishery sustainability and safeguard reef dependent fisheries from destructive urchin grazing
Determining when and where to fish: Linking scallop spawning, settlement, size and condition to collaborative spatial harvest and industry in-season management strategies
Monitoring abalone juvenile abundance following removal of Centrostephanus and translocation
Tasmania's Marine Atlas
Marine spatial planning (MSP) has emerged in recent years as a tool for sea use management. However, MSP requires adequate and accurate information on the biophysical state and usage of the marine environment. Such data often exists, but generally not in a format which allows several data layers to be overlaid in order to identify potential conflicts/trade-offs.
Marine information management and data science are developing areas of research addressing how to easily access, collate and use multiple disparate sources of data to support marine ecosystem and resource management. Significant efforts are made to standardize the collection, reporting and open access to marine data in existing databases and platforms, but these platforms commonly use specific (and differing) sources and types of data. Challenges arise from disparities in spatiotemporal resolution, uncertainty in geographic positioning, diversity of data sources and types, lack of access, and often limited metadata standards within and across scientific disciplines. To address this problem, this project will identify, compile and standardize spatially-resolved datasets required for marine social-ecological system management for Tasmanian State waters. No new field-based data will be collected, although secondary analysis may create new datasets. Rather than duplicating effort, this project builds on accessible databases and platforms to provide recommendations on the availability and best practices of using marine data to support data-driven decision-making processes in Tasmanian waters.
Perhaps more importantly, this project will also compare various off-the-shelf tools to identify trade-offs at various scales and resolutions of interest. Currently, many off-the-shelf spatial multi-criteria decision-analysis tools and methods exist (e.g. Marxan, CommunityViz, SSANTO…). More have been developed for more specific uses (e.g. the Aquaspace tool - developed to plan trade-offs with aquaculture in Europe). Research is required to identify the most appropriate tools for use in identifying conflicts/trade-offs in Tasmanian waters, given the needs of decision-makers and the available data.
Finally, this project will provide planning for database longevity.
Final report
Indigenous business development opportunities and impediments in the fishing and seafood industry - 'Wave to plate' establishing a market for Tasmanian cultural fisheries
Aboriginal wild catch is aspirational, seasonal and culture-dependent. For these reasons, it does not compete well against large-scale, industrial fishing operations. Addressing the FRDC’s Indigenous Sector strategy to improve understanding and engagement that ‘best support individual and community economic development’ (FRDC 2015), this project aims to develop a niche market of boutique seafoods, together with investigating how the arts and tourism sectors can foster fisheries management for greater Indigenous community benefit.
A Tasmanian Aboriginal engagement framework in fisheries has not yet been developed by government (Lee 2016, in press). This project will create the conditions for extensions development, based upon resetting engagement terms between Indigenous peoples and government, providing a toolkit of self-determining strategies for regional development. Economic models for future development of fisheries can build upon the capacity of Indigenous communities to translate value into benefit in subsequent projects, such as employment opportunities within the network chain of wild catch procurement to presentation.
There is a need to provide best practice guidance that demonstrates Australia’s commitment to international obligations, such as 2007’s UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In Australia, building on the growing jurisprudence that affirms native title rights to land, the High Court in 2013 extended such rights to commercial fishing in the Torres Strait in its Akiba v Commonwealth decision (Butterly 2013). However, judicial recognition of Indigenous fishing or other marine-based rights does not in itself provide specific guidance on how those environmental resources should be managed culturally and economically.
Final report
- access to marine resources for Aboriginal Tasmanians;
- the governance forms, such as a proposed Indigenous Fisheries Advisory Committee and cultural marine planning unit, to assist in decision-making that provide fairness, equity,transparency and opportunities for Aboriginal Tasmanians to develop cultural fisheries that suit local conditions;
- the models for Indigenous rights to resources and business enterprise that provides a best fit for Aboriginal Tasmanian regional development and fisheries management;
- the research directions that require a multi-disciplinary focus; and
- the types of partnerships that can aid in the establishing a market for cultural fisheries.