The SA State Government has made a commitment to reform the Marine Scalefish Fishery (MSF) that aims to provide long-term sustainability of key stocks for both recreational and commercial fisheries, and unlock the industries economic potential. The key reforms include a voluntary buy-back scheme targeting the removal of at least 30% of commercial licences and the introduction of new zoning and quota management regulations. The timeframe for the reforms will be determined in consultation with the industry. Details on the implementation strategy have yet to be developed, but will need to be underpinned by extensive stakeholder consultation and backed by research that provides confidence that among the approaches considered, those chosen will best deliver the intent of the reforms.

This project aims to develop an SA Gulfs and Coastal ecosystem model to provide a Management Strategy Evaluation (MSE) tool to assess and optimise a range of reform scenarios. The project will link in closely with FRDC 2017/014 (Informing structural reform in the MSF), utilising many of its key outputs, including time series of spatial distribution of catch and effort, social-economic performance, and reform implementation scenarios. This project also will extend the investigation by integrating environmental time-series data to evaluate changes in productivity over time, identified as a potential factor in declining fisheries catches in the GSV ecosystem (FRDC 2013/031). Identifying the causes of productivity loss and its impact on fish production are important to resolve, especially in the context of the MSF reforms. Ultimately, the project aims to provide decision support tools to assess and evaluate the performance of diverse fisheries management strategies, and how these may perform under varying production regimes. Such an approach will provide a platform to evaluate and optimise the effectiveness of management strategies, and help ensure the fishery reforms achieve their key objectives.

The project will deliver recommendations for the best options, including standards and systems to support the convergence of historical research data that will be integrated with next generation decision support and data collection tools. The project will deliver pathways for industry engagement, investment and future ownership of the tools, measured through agreements for management of producers’ big data platforms. This investment will inform producers, RDCs and government of policy options and operations framework for ownership, management and access to big data including protecting ownership and access rights of big data stakeholders. The investment will deliver a value proposition for producers in the agricultural big data economy. Through this project, producers will increase their knowledge and skills to evaluate ownership and access rights and the value of their data. The project will also deliver improved cross sector industry research collaboration with 15 agricultural industries for the benefit to Australian agriculture.

The need exists to bring together WINSC members from wide geographical and demographic spheres as well as from a diverse range of women involved in the Australasian Seafood Industry to hold an annual conference and AGM to build the capacity of its seafood women to contribute to their industry

Following the work of the AAWWG the four aquatic sectors now have a range of findings that, when combined, produce a series of practical outcomes and materials for circulation and use within the various sectors.

The take-up of these guidance materials now lies with the aquatic sectors to which they apply; commercial capture fishing, aquaculture, recreational fishing, ornamental fish and restaurants holding live seafood.

There is a need to undertake a workshop (or a series of workshops) to determine how well these previously developed materials are being used by industry and identify the reasons why there is not adoption (if this is the case). The workshop(s) will then provide advice and guidance to FRDC as to whether there is a need for fund further work to ‘plug any gaps’ or modify any materials that have been found to be difficult to use/adopt, or whether there is a need to assess industry barriers to change.