Appropriate monitoring strategies and harvest control rules are needed to ensure sustainability and
maximum economic benefit from the coral trout stocks in the Queensland Coral Reef Fin fish Fishery
(CRFFF). This is not an easy accomplishment in a fishery that is as spatially complex as the CRFFF,
and so in order to determine whether monitoring programs and harvest control rules are worth
implementing, it is better to try several techniques on a virtual fishery before doing so in reality. This
can be done by testing alternative procedures in a Management Strategy Evaluation (MSE) framework.
The project will test in an MSE framework the effectiveness of:

1. several potential monitoring and sampling regimes of the coral trout stock, including the existing
Long Term Monitoring Program (LTMP) surveys,

2. different ways of analysing the data collected from a monitoring program, and

3. candidate harvest control rules that translate the perceived state of the fishery into a TAC.

Comparisons of alternative monitoring, analysis and harvest control rules will help DEEDI assess their
cost effectiveness. Lastly, since quota trading was introduced, industry has stressed the fact that the
economic conditions of the fishery have changed substantially, and so an update of economic data is
needed urgently for the evaluation of the above management strategies to be relevant and useful.