There is a growing need to establish fishing industries as environmentally sustainable within Australia and internationally. The needs stems from both an economic marketing aspect and a growing community expectation. It is also important for fishing industries to understand that they contribute to marine impacts on a broader ecological scale. Whilst the principles of Ecosystem Based Fishery Management (EBFM) have been established for over a decade, it is only in recent years that EBFM frameworks have begun to be developed and applied by Government agencies (e.g. Fletcher et al 2010, West Coast Bioregion of Western Australia).

The environmental impacts of benthic trawl fisheries require greater attention than most other fishing methodologies, primarily due to their impact on the benthic environment, by-catch species and associated communities. As a critical impactor on marine bioregions, it is important that future ecological research for benthic trawl fisheries is prioritised and conducted in a manner that fits within a broader EBFM framework.

Concomitantly, there is an increasing interest from fishing industries to seek third-party certification of environmental sustainability for eco-labelling of their products and subsequent market advantage. These Program's require fisheries to meet standards that are often higher than the levels required by the Commonwealth Government to meet conditions of the EPBC Act. Although such accreditations are accompanied by substantial documentation of management practices, it is difficult for non-accrediated fisheries to benchmark themselves against accredited "best practice" industries.

This project aims to develop a reporting framework for environmental assessment of prawn trawl fisheries in Australia. By using the Marine Stewardship Certification accredited Spencer Gulf Prawn Trawl Fishery as a case study, the report will provide other Australian prawn trawl fisheries 1) a benchmark of third party accredited environmental management, and 2) a tool for prioritising and conducting their own ecological research within an EBFM framework.

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.