New FRDC-funded research has created a map-based framework to measure the cumulative effects of recreational and commercial fishing on Australia’s marine ecosystems.

By Dempsey Ward

With more and more human activities moving into the oceans, there has been an increased awareness around the risk of unforeseen impacts and environmental degradation that can impact marine climate and oceanic activities.

The CSIRO team working on FRDC Project 2018-020 has developed a Cumulative Effects Assessment framework - creating a map-based assessment of the cumulative effects multiple fisheries and sectors (recreational and commercial), are having on individual species, habitats and communities.  

Trying to understand the complete state of an ecosystem and all its interacting parts is a substantial and challenging task, especially with waters as large and diverse as Australia’s, says Senior Principal Research Scientist for CSIRO Environment Beth Fulton, who led the project. 

“Government agencies and society have increasingly pushed for clearer evidence-based approaches to describe the on-going pressures human activities are having on the oceans.” Beth says.  

The project team at CSIRO reviewed the national and international methods used to undertake Ecological Risk Assessments and Cumulative Effects Assessments on marine environments.  

With this knowledge, they developed a new framework called the Cumulative Effects Assessment Framework - which can be applied to any species or fishery across the world.  

“We combined the two tools into one to allow ease of use for our project team,” Beth says. “This also ensures that the method is consistent with the approaches already common to Australian fisheries.”  

The team used a map-based method to display their results - helping users understand the impacts in a visually accessible way through ‘hotspots’. The darker the hotspot, the larger the impact from factors from different kinds of fishing. To date, 409 species were tested against the assessment framework.  

“The old risk assessments only had a single-point score system, which stopped you from knowing if there was a ‘hotspot’ location of fishing pressure impacting the species”. 

These images show a species-specific ‘hotspot’ map for Tiger flathead (Platycephalus richardsoni). Figure (a) marks where fisheries could potentially impact the species, whilst Figure (b) shows the present impacts, with the darker blue shades showing where factors are overlapping (in this case it was different kinds of fishing, but in future it could include other human uses and climate change, for example). Figure (c) adds marine parks and fisheries zoning as additional affects so that it is possible to see what management is already accounting for and what is left over. 

At present, the framework does not include all impacts, for example it excludes climate change impacts. However, in future other pressures and uses can easily be added in using the same framework. 

Beth says that a future study would seek input from First Nations fishers to help include Customary fisheries into the framework.  

“As First Nations have lived with the resources for an exceptionally long time, there should be information on stock pressures and responses in Customary Fisheries.”   

Beth says that she could see the process used for this study being converted into an online tool format - facilitating the potential for wider use and its seamless integration into existing management processes. 

“This could involve users executing the steps we did for our project, uploading the data, and generating results for their species of interest.” Beth said. 

The project involved CSIRO Environment, Hobart, and funding from FRDC on behalf of the Australian Government.  

The final report, including the map-based data results, are available for viewing.  

FRDC Projects
2018-020: Cumulative impacts across fisheries in Australia’s marine environment 

This relates to R&D Plan Outcomes 1 and 2