A concern for the consequences of bycatch and discards in fisheries has led to the implementation of
new policies and fisheries management plans aimed at their reduction in many fisheries around the
world. Such plans have been developed for the Australian Commonwealth fisheries (the most recent
bycatch action plan extends...
The Abalone Fishery is one of Victoria's most valuable commercial fisheries and almost all of the catch is exported to international markets, predominately in Asia. An outbreak of a virus called the Abalone Viral Ganglioneuritis (AVG) decimated one third of Australia’s abalone, starting in 2005. However, there has been little...
Australian Commonwealth fisheries have adopted maximum economic yield as a target reference point. A bioeconomic model has been developed for one key fishery - the Northern Prawn Fishery - and is used in the provision of management advice. The development and application of this model has highlighted some challenges for...
Technical efficiency (TE) measures the relationship between a vessel’s inputs to the fishing process and its outputs, with full efficiency being achieved when outputs are maximised from a given set of inputs. Inputs can be physical (e.g. the vessel, gear, engine, onboard equipment, etc.), flexible (time spent fishing, size of...
Fishers are faced with multiple risks, including unpredictability of future catch rates, prices and costs. While the latter are largely beyond the control of fisheries managers, effective fisheries management should reduce uncertainty about future catches while also enhancing profitability. Different management instruments are likely to have different impacts on the...
Differences in technical efficiency of fishing vessels are often attributed to skipper skill and differences in technology. While the later can be defined in terms of the technology employed, the former is more difficult to quantify. In this paper, the contribution of technology and skipper characteristics (e.g. level of education,...
Days at sea restrictions were introduced in 2003 as part of the cod recovery strategy in the North Sea. The impact on the profitability of the fleet of the effort controls, however, is not immediately discernable, as the fishery was also subject to changes in costs, prices and stock conditions....
Capacity reduction programs in the form of buybacks or decommissioning programs have had relatively widespread application in fisheries in the US, Europe and Australia. A common criticism of such programs is that they remove the least efficient vessels first, resulting in an increase in average efficiency of the remaining fleet....
With international efforts to develop ecosystem-based management of ocean uses, there has been a growing call for the development of integrated assessment tools, including the design of models which can be used to identify possible futures and evaluate alternative management strategies. Along with this, there is increasing recognition that such...
Spatial bio-economic models are becoming increasingly important in the attempt to offer ever more dependable advice to fisheries managers. The main reason for this is the escalating interest in marine protected areas and more precisely fishing exclusion zones. As such the key issue of fishing effort dynamics needs to be...