Development of an ecosystem approach to the monitoring and management of Western Australian fisheries

Funded Activity Summary

There are currently no standard techniques that can be used to assess whether fishing has had significant impacts on ecosystem structure. The current round of EPBC assessments has demonstrated that a more robust assessment of ecosystem impacts will be required when the next application for export exemption is submitted in five years time. It is vital for WA's export fisheries that the types of changes in exploitation and/or environment that could cause marked changes in ecosystem structure are identified, the types of data necessary to assess whether such changes are occurring are determined, and cost-effective methods are developed to provide information on the level of ecosystem changes that have occurred.

Having appropriate techniques to assess whether fishing within a region is significantly modifying the ecosystem is seen as a national priority. At a recent workshop held by the Research Committee of the Australian Fisheries Managers Forum (AFMF) it was concluded that different types and levels of analysis are likely to be needed for different purposes and it would be “inappropriate to abandon any particular approach prematurely”. Given the potential costs associated with the collection of new or additional data at an ecosystem level, it is imperative that attempts are made to see if existing datasets, such as those currently maintained by fisheries agencies on catch and effort, are suitable for this purpose and to apply modelling approaches, such as those developed in FRDC 2000/311, to these refined datasets.

Completing routine ecosystem-level assessments will only be feasible when tools are available to simplify the complex process of analysing the multi-sector, multi-species databases that are present in WA (and most jurisdictions). There is a need, therefore, to identify and test a variety of statistical methods using these datasets to determine if any are suitable for detecting shifts in ecosystems or community structure.

Objectives:
1. Test the robustness of statistical procedures to identify impacts of multi-sector fishing on community composition using existing fishery data.
2. Assess the level of change in community composition in each bioregion of WA during the previous 30 years.
3. Identify key data to which ecosystem structure and management strategies are most sensitive and which should be collected in the future.
4. Identify critical changes in exploitation and/or environment that would impact marine ecosystems markedly.
5. Identify areas where more detailed research and/or monitoring are needed.

Funded Activity Details

Start Date: 30-09-2005

End Date: 31-08-2010

Funding Scheme: Funding Scheme not available

Funding Amount: $576,428.81

Funder: Fisheries Research and Development Corporation

Research Topics

ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)

There are no FoR codes available for this funding activity

ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)

There are no SEO codes available for this funding activity

Other Keywords

Biomass | Data | Ecosystem | Finfish Fisheries | Fisheries Management | Mortality | Reproduction | Resource Sharing | Stakeholder | Stock Assessment

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