In the long term the POMS Resistance Breeding Levy will secure the future of ASI and by extension selective breeding for Pacific Oysters. This in turn secures the investments made over many years by federal funding agencies. Due to delays achieving unanimous stakeholder support the approval for the levy has been later than anticipated but was formally adopted and implemented from October 13, 2014. As a result of this delay ASI is not in a position to enter into some key contracts in terms of provision of services for current data sets. The most pressing of these is the provision of genetic services undertaken by CSIRO.

The support from CRC for this activity will open up an training opportunity we would like to offer. There are a number of other participants in the CRC who are initiating family breeding programs or planning to initiate these programs. This project thus presents the opportunity of conducting the analysis as a training exercise for CRC participants including key stakeholders in the oyster breeding programs to improve understanding of the process and logistics of implementing family breeding program.

The monitoring of salmon farms in Tasmania is more comprehensive than that in most other parts of the world and is based on rigorous and broad-ranging research and monitoring that has been ongoing for over 20 years. The success of this integrated research framework has been enhanced through very strong links between government, industry and researchers. Robust regulatory controls have been used to manage benthic impacts from salmon farming activities, and through the adoption of adaptive management strategies, organic loading effects from marine farming operations have been effectively managed using the environmental monitoring framework administered by the Tasmanian Government. The salmon industry-funded Broadscale Environmental Monitoring Program (BEMP) for the D'Entrecasteaux Channel region (which commenced in 2009) has further enhanced the understanding of impacts to include the detection of broadscale impacts to water quality and sediment health. The only marine habitats not subject to broadscale assessment of potential impacts from salmon farming are rocky reef communities. As the Tasmanian salmon industry expands, both in terms of production and growing areas, commercial and recreational fishing groups are concerned that their targeted fishing grounds, which are predominantly based around rocky reef systems, may be impacted by nutrient emissions released through marine farming activities.

This proposal seeks to provide an immediate response to characterising reef community health prior to the development of new growing areas in south eastern Tasmanian waters.

Producing peer-reviewed publication on these topics is part of the suite of approaches aimed at increasing uptake of FH projects. Scientific papers enable exchange of ideas internationally. They are part of the process of changing fishery management which needs these types of outputs to defend decisions.

Recent declines in Eastern Tasmania (Tarbath & Gardner, 2012) and Tiparra Reef in South Australia (Chick & Mayfield, 2012) suggest a potential for changes in productivity. Further challenges to successfully managing abalone include periods of poor recruitment in some areas, rising Australian east coast temperatures, the Victorian virus outbreak, toxic blooms in Tasmania, and mortality events in Tasmania.

All these challenges to current management indicate the need for more detailed and rapidly reactive and defensible management of Australian abalone stocks.

The management strategy evaluation (MSE) framework from FRDC 2007/020 “Biological Performance Indicators for abalone fisheries”, focussed on the utility of classical performance measures. However, the Multi-Criterion-Decision-Analysis Harvest Strategy (MCDA-HS) being developed in Tasmania will integrate classic fishery Performance Measures (PMs) with new Spatial PMs, and include local complexity in growth (the latter are important for the TAC/LML debate). Now GPS data loggers have become compulsory within the Tasmanian fishery (2006/029 – “Using GPS technology to improve fishery-dependent data collection in abalone fisheries”), the need to test these new empirical harvest strategies, that include spatial PMs, is becoming urgent. The MSE framework, therefore needs modification to successfully simulate the new spatial performance measures and then test the performance of the novel harvest strategies. South Australia introduced a non-spatial MCDA-HS without testing and an array of unintended consequences is becoming apparent. To retain confidence in the application of formal harvest strategies with associated decision rules testing the harvest strategies as they are developed remains important.

Novel harvest Strategies need to be tested to determine by how much they improve the setting of TACs and associated LMLs. There is a recognized need to interact with FRDC 2011/201: “Implementing a spatial assessment and decision process to improve fishery management outcomes using geo-referenced diver data” so both projects can benefit from each other.