12,317 results
Environment
PROJECT NUMBER • 2009-029
PROJECT STATUS:
COMPLETED

Ecological risk assessment for effects of fishing on habitats and communities

It is now widely recognized that fisheries can have impacts on marine species, habitats and ecosystems beyond the direct impacts of fishing on target species. For example, hundreds of species are regularly caught and discarded in many trawl and longline fisheries and in particular, interactions with...
ORGANISATION:
CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere Hobart

Tactical Research Fund: Developing a management framework and harvest strategies for small scale multi-species, multi-method community based fisheries, using the South Australian Lakes and Coorong Fishery as a case study

Project number: 2013-225
Project Status:
Completed
Budget expenditure: $60,000.00
Principal Investigator: Ian Knuckey
Organisation: Fishwell Consulting Pty Ltd
Project start/end date: 10 Oct 2013 - 10 Feb 2014
Contact:
FRDC

Need

There are inherent challenges in managing small scale multi-species, multi method fisheries, particularly in a community based fishery context, which require careful consideration in the development of appropriate harvest strategies. While there is a significant degree of targeting involved in multi-species fisheries, the majority of target species will not always be caught during individual gear sets, and the species composition of the catch may be spatially or temporally specific. It can be difficult to ensure that all species caught are fished sustainably (and not only the target species) because species have various life-history characteristics and productivities, and different degrees of susceptibility to the gear. Many species are caught by a variety of gears and it is often difficult to account for all sources of mortality in assessments and the different life stages targeted by particular gear types. The development of harvest strategies for data-poor fisheries presents additional challenges in attempting to reconcile available information and capacity with formal, defensible strategies that achieve the desired objectives for the fishery and fisheries legislation. There is a need for harvest strategies, particularly for community-based fisheries, to be easily understood and accepted by key stakeholders, pragmatic and cost effective.

The LCF is a small scale multi-species, multi-method community based fishery located at the end of the Murray-Darling system and is subject to varying environmental conditions (drought and flooding). The primary target species include Pipi, Yellow-eye Mullet, Golden Perch, Mulloway, Greenback Flounder and Black Bream. A number of other marine, estuarine and freshwater species (native and exotic) are also taken. The fishery contributes to the socio-economic well-being of regional coastal communities in the Lakes and Coorong region through commercial and recreational activity and harbors significant cultural and spiritual significance for the Ngarrindjeri people.

Objectives

1. Identify the attributes required in an environmentally limited fishery that can be used to determine optimal management frameworks.
2. Develop a set of performance indicators that can be used to support management of an environmentally diverse suite of species in a highly variable ecosystem.
3. Develop a framework that supports more flexible and adaptive management processes to provide for business adaptability and structural adjustment in the Fishery while limiting effort to the appropriate sustainable level.
4. Create a management framework that can be adapted for use across a range of small scale multi-species, multi-method community based fisheries.

Final report

ISBN: 978-0-9873286-9-4
Author: Ian Knuckey
Final Report • 2015-02-25 • 3.42 MB
2013-225-DLD.pdf

Summary

The commercial Lakes and Coorong Fishery (LCF) operates at the end of the Murray-Darling Basin where the river system meets the Southern Ocean, encompassing a diverse range of freshwater, estuarine and marine habitats and communities.  This multi-gear fishery targets a range of species including Pipi (Goolwa cockle - Donax deltoides), Mulloway (Argyrosomus japonicus), Yelloweye Mullet (Aldrichetta forsteri), Black Bream (Acanthopagrus butcheri), Greenback Flounder (Rhombosolea tapirina), Golden Perch (Macquaria ambigua), and Bony Bream (Nematalosa erebi) as well as the introduced fish species European Carp (Cyprinus carpio) and Redfin (Perca fluviatilis).  

The outputs of this project will be used to improve the performance of the LCF and will be directly incorporated into the development of harvest strategies developed for finfish species under the new fishery management plan due in 2015. The longer term outcome from this project is that the approach used to develop this management framework can be adapted to other similar fisheries around Australia. Using the capacity of the Australian Fisheries Management Forum, the development of fishery management frameworks and performance indicators will be provided to other jurisdictions to support fishery management improvement in other small-scale, multi-species, multi-method, community-based fisheries.

Keywords: Harvest Strategy, small-scale fisheries, Lakes and Coorong Fishery, data-poor fishery

Integrating fishery-independent and -dependent data for improved sustainability of fisheries resources and other aspects of biodiversity

Project number: 2008-004
Project Status:
Completed
Budget expenditure: $600,001.00
Principal Investigator: Charles A. Gray
Organisation: Sydney Institute of Marine Science (SIMS)
Project start/end date: 4 Jun 2009 - 30 Oct 2012
Contact:
FRDC

Need

Recent shifts in resource-management have required so-called sustainable “ecosystem-based” management of fisheries, which requires reliable data about harvested stocks, by-catch and other species (to assess effects on biodiversity). The well-known problems of data from commercial fisheries strongly indicate that fishery-independent sampling is much more robust to provide the required information. The problem remains, however, that it has not yet been demonstrated how efficient it is and how more useful to arrive at appropriate managerial decisions to use the data from independent sources. This is one important impediment to “take-up” of appropriate data by managers of fisheries. This need can only be filled by making planned comparisons between decision-making based on “traditional”, fishery-based data and decisions made when better data are incorporated. To compare these approaches requires incorporating fishery-independent data (i.e. collected contemporaneously with traditional, fishery-dependent data) into the process of decision making.

An experimental approach will be used to test the relative value of different sources of data for the assessment and management of estuarine fisheries resources and biodiversity in NSW. Fishery-independent sampling tools have already been developed in project 2002/059 and will be implemented across a number of estuaries with different management regimes (i.e. open and closed to commercial/recreational fishing). Data from commercial and recreational fisheries (i.e. catch and effort data, port monitoring of landings, creel surveys of recreational fishing) will also be collected simultaneously in these estuaries. The costs and benefits of each type of data and their managerial response can then be tested over equivalent spatial and temporal scales. This will provide a scientific basis for determining the most appropriate mix of fishery-independent and –dependent data for improving the sustainability of fisheries resources and biodiversity in estuaries of NSW.

Objectives

1. Evaluate the effectiveness of a standardised fishery-independent sampling strategy compared with sources of fishery-dependent data (e.g. data from commercial and recreational fisheries) for assessing fisheries resources and biodiversity.
2. Investigate the extent to which fishery-independent data reduce uncertainty in the management of estuarine fisheries resources and lead to decisions that are more reliable and robust.
3. Examine the values of fishery-independent sampling for use across estuaries with different management regimes (e.g. estuaries open and closed to commercial and recreational fishing
marine parks) and for assessing the impacts of immediate environmental perturbations (e.g. floods, pollution) and those in the future (e.g. impacts of climatic change on the dynamics of populations of fish and diversity of fish assemblages).

Final report

ISBN: 978-0-9941504-1-7
Author: Charles Gray
Environment
PROJECT NUMBER • 2016-047
PROJECT STATUS:
COMPLETED

Addressing knowledge gaps for studies of the effect of water resource development on the future of the Northern Prawn Fishery

Overview The objectives of this project were to use historical data and derived knowledge from banana prawn research in the Gulf of Carpentaria (GoC) to identify knowledge gaps and examine estuarine juvenile banana prawn abundance in a subset of Gulf estuaries where water development is...
ORGANISATION:
CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere Hobart
Environment
PROJECT NUMBER • 2004-101
PROJECT STATUS:
COMPLETED

ESD Reporting and Assessment Subprogram: review of the scope, assessment methods and management responses for fisheries ESD and EBFM in Australia

In 1997 the FRDC Board initiated a review of ESD application across jurisdictions (FRDC Project 98/168), and later worked with the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture (SCFA) to develop a national approach to ESD in fisheries. Following on from this project, the FRDC Board suggested that...
ORGANISATION:
CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere Hobart
Environment
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