Abstract for presentation at Spatial Sciences Institute International Biennial Conference

Major collapses of abalone fisheries around the world have been preceded by a spatial serial depletion of abalone populations. As in other fisheries, this serial depletion has been difficult to detect and to understand without fine scale monitoring and analysis of spatial effort distribution. In recent years a field of fisheries science has started to evolve which looks at the spatial distribution of fishing effort in commercial fisheries and spatial fleet dynamics, and novel applications of some GIS tools are being developed. Despite the relative health of the Tasmanian abalone fishery (a $A100 million fishery) compared to other abalone fisheries around the world, many aspects of the reporting and assessment process require improvement to ensure sustainability of the fishery. History has shown that reliance on catch and temporal effort data reported at large spatial scales (current Tasmanian practice) is inadequate for assessment of abalone stocks, or for detecting spatial depletion. Traditional fishery independent methods used to estimate population abundance (both relative and absolute) are also inadequate, and prohibitively expensive for monitoring fishery stability. In a pilot study conducted at TAFI, GPS data loggers were deployed on fishing boats and set to record latitude and longitude at ten second intervals. The use of GPS loggers can provide high spatial resolution data on fishing activity, and improve the quality of fishing effort data. A number of GIS tools applied in animal behaviour analyses have been used to quantify the spatial distribution of fishing effort as captured by the loggers. If we can describe spatial distribution of fishing effort, we may be able to detect changes in that spatial distribution and be forewarned of depleted fish stocks.