35 results
Industry
Environment
PROJECT NUMBER • 2014-032
PROJECT STATUS:
COMPLETED

Improved understanding of Tasmanian harmful algal blooms and biotoxin events to support seafood risk management

The 2012 Tasmanian biotoxin event represents a paradigm shift for seafood risk management in Tasmania and Australia as a whole. The causative dinoflagellates are extremely difficult to identify by routine plankton monitoring, and are toxic at very low cell concentrations (50-100 cells/L). Sampling...
ORGANISATION:
University of Tasmania (UTAS)

Testing abalone empirical harvest strategies, for setting TACs and associated LMLs, that include the use of novel spatially explicit performance measures

Project number: 2013-200
Project Status:
Completed
Budget expenditure: $185,630.40
Principal Investigator: Malcolm Haddon
Organisation: CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere Hobart
Project start/end date: 1 Sep 2013 - 31 Aug 2015
Contact:
FRDC

Need

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.

Objectives

1. Review objectives and logic of having and setting Legal Minimum Lengths in abalone fisheries and how these interact with TAC levels.
2. Conduct Manager/Industry workshops to inform, identify issues, and to select LML/TAC scenarios within particular harvest strategies for testing by Management Strategy Evaluation..
3. Develop new modules for the present Abalone MSE Framework for testing LML/TAC harvest strategies containing multiple empirical performance measures (MCDA) that use spatially explicit PMs.
4. Use the modified MSE framework to test new Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis Abalone Harvest Strategy under development in FRDC 2011/201.

Final report

ISBN: 978-1-4863-0731-9
Author: Malcolm Haddon and Craig Mundy
Final Report • 2017-10-01 • 3.78 MB
2013-200-DLD.pdf

Summary

The management of abalone stocks is difficult for many reasons including their high value and the exceptional levels of spatial structuring found in their stocks. In Tasmania, for example, suggestions to change such things as a legal minimum length or introduce a formal harvest strategy to replace the current relatively informal process, always engender high levels of sometimes heated debate. An aim of this work, conducted by Malcolm Haddon and Craig Mundy of CSIRO and the University of Tasmania respectively, was to formally examine the implications of changing legal minimum lengths and the importance of such LML to the management of abalone. This was in the context of using management strategy evaluation to test alternative potential harvest strategies for use, in the first place, within the Tasmanian abalone fisheries. With the advent and growth of more public scrutiny of wild fisheries a need for a more defensible, repeatable, and publically available process for setting abalone TACs had become urgent. This project aimed to contribute to the development of such formal harvest strategies that would both successfully generate workable management advice and be defensible under anyone’s scrutiny.

Industry
PROJECT NUMBER • 2011-201
PROJECT STATUS:
COMPLETED

Implementing a spatial assessment and decision process to improve fishery management outcomes using geo-referenced diver data

Fishing activity was captured across 53,852 one Hectare hex grid cells across Tasmania. A total of 113,164 diving hours were recorded across 125,536 individual fishing events (Table 1). Between 2012 and 2016, the Tasmanian Geo-Fishery Dependent Data (GFDD) program captured between 85 % and 90 % of...
ORGANISATION:
University of Tasmania (UTAS)
Environment
PROJECT NUMBER • 2015-024
PROJECT STATUS:
CURRENT

Managing ecosystem interactions across differing environments: building flexibility and risk assurance into environmental management strategies

Summary The overarching aim of this research was to provide an improved understanding of the environmental interactions of Atlantic Salmon farming and to provide recommendations to both government and industry on monitoring and management strategies that are appropriate to the level of risk...
ORGANISATION:
University of Tasmania (UTAS)
View Filter

Species