Commonwealth Fisheries Management PDF Download

"The Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA) manages a diverse range of fisheries in terms of method of capture (line, trawl, dive, ets.), location (tropics to sub-Antarctic) and size of venture (commercial, artisanal). This complicates the management and data requirements for each fishery, and as a result, current monitoring arrangement vary significantly depending on the type and history of the fishery. In this reqport, monitoring is defined in its broadest terms as monitoring for the pursposes of compliance, management and research. This includes fishery dependent data sources (such as logbook data), fishery independent sources (survey data, observer programs, remote observations for compliance) and other sources (VMS0, processor returns), economic data (such as that held by ABARES), and social data (quota trading information). This patchwork of monitoring systems is often not well linked with broader policy, objectives and goals. In particular, there is little link with recent policy developments in that both the harvest strategy policy (HSP) and guidelines, and the ERA/ERM processes have key implications for monitoring. Many of Australia's fisheries are under serious economic constraints ... . This has meant direct pressure by industry of AFMA to contain or reduce its management and research costs. This demand has to be traded off against the fact that the resources being fished are a public asset and managers still have a strong public mandate to manage the resource for future generations."--Non-technical summary.