Project number: 2023-099
Project Status:
Current
Budget expenditure: $48,585.67
Principal Investigator: Camille White
Organisation: Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) Hobart
Project start/end date: 7 Feb 2024 - 7 Jul 2024
Contact:
FRDC

Need

MHWs can have a devastating impact on marine ecosystems, with a strong El Nino event currently underway in Australia. Forecasts by CSIRO indicate sustained increases in water temperatures down the east coast of Tasmania for this summer, with potential to significantly impact on fisheries, aquaculture, and marine habitat. Improved forecasting by CSIRO has provided industry and government with the opportunity to be better prepared, with the monitoring of ambient temperature is a key component of this. While sea surface temperature (SST) models from BOM and NOAA can provide information regarding broadscale patterns, missing is fine-scale, near-coastal and below surface information that is highly relevant to fisheries, aquaculture and marine coastal environments. While some industries monitor temperature as part of operations (e.g. salmon, oyster aquaculture), other industries are missing any fine scale information that may be of relevance to their operations. This project has two main components:
1. To support and integrate existing infrastructure that collects temperature data across the summer along the east-coast of Tasmania. This includes data collected by IMAS research projects, both long and short-term, where QAQC on data is high and there is confidence the data is robust both spatially and temporally. This data will be used to understand broadscale trends at depth across a predicted MHW event.
2. To implement a pilot industry deployment of temperature loggers across the seafood supply chain. The two industries targeted for pilot deployments will be the octopus fishery and the rock lobster fishery, with loggers mounted on pots and in holding wells of boats. This pilot program will aim to develop industry-relevant temperature monitoring methods for industry for future MHW events. Data from objective one will be used to ground-truth results and validate methods used in the pilot program.
Overall, the data will be used by government and industry to aid in the fisheries management in MHW conditions into the future.

Objectives

1. To develop a framework for collection of robust temperature data from depth along the east coast of Tasmania
2. To validate the approach of rapid industry deployment of loggers to monitor temperature in MHW conditions for providing fine-scale variation in temperature.
3. Use the combined data to better understand how temperature data can inform fisheries management for future MHW events

Final report

ISBN: PRINT 978-1-922708-86-1, ELECTRONIC 978-1-922708-87-8
Authors: Camille White Samantha Twiname Craig Mundy Benjamin Quigley & Caleb Gardner
Final Report • 2024-08-01 • 3.57 MB
2023-099-DLD.pdf

Summary

Marine heatwaves can have devastating impacts on marine ecosystems, with a strong El Nino event forecast in Australia for the summer/autumn of 2023-24. Forecasts by CSIRO indicated sustained increases in water temperatures down the east coast of Tasmania with potential to significantly affect fisheries, aquaculture, and marine habitat. While sea surface temperature (SST) outputs from Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) can provide information regarding broadscale patterns, missing is fine-scale, near-coastal and below surface information that is highly relevant to fisheries, aquaculture and marine coastal environments.
This project aimed to develop methods of collecting data at a scale and in locations that are relevant to fisheries in Tasmania. Methods were developed for both the deployment of instrumentation on fishing gear, along with R routines for efficiently and effectively presenting and reporting on the data. HOBO temperature loggers were deployed on commercial fishing gear from February to May 2024 to collect fine scale temperature data. Industries included the commercial Southern Rock Lobster, octopus and scalefish fisheries. Once the data was collected, it was cleaned and complied and used to compare to SST outputs for marine heatwave (MHW) monitoring.
 
Temperature data was collected across the state for the period from February to May 2024. Outputs in the form of letters containing the data they collected where provided back to participant fishers. This included a map of where the loggers were deployed, a per deployment temperature summary, the in-water temperature profile compared to seasonal averages and thresholds and overlapped on MHW classification plots. In addition, all data collected was developed into a spatially aggregated temporal summary to visualise the scope of data collected during the project.
 
These methods will be an essential tool for the management of fisheries in future MHW events, allowing for the tracking of temperature through the seafood supply chain and providing the framework to compile spatially and temporally robust datasets. End users of this data will be industry, researchers and government looking to better understand and manage MHW conditions as they become increasingly common into the future. Monitoring temperature through deployments with commercial operators will help to improve decision making for fishing locations, give marine farming better preparation around stock flows and allow for strategic decisions to be taken to adapt to changing environmental conditions. Overall, the method developed through this project fills an identified gap at a local level, which allows fishers to monitor temperature at industry-relevant and at a spatial scale that is indicative of fishing activities.

Related research

Blank
Environment
Industry