Jane Alpine

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Moving Feasts Eddies Pelagic Management
Jane Alpine Alistair Hobday
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Animal-Habitat Associations

• Critical to developing management strategies
• Tendency to treat ocean basins at one big habitat
• Perception is reinforced from surface view of
  ocean

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So is the ocean one big habitat?

• New era in understanding identifying oceanic
  habitats and their dynamics
• Why?
• Remote Sensing
• Animal Tagging Technology
• Implications?
• Better equipped to protect
• ocean biota achieve
• conservation and resource
• management objectives

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Oceanic Habitat Examples

• Frontal regions
• Upwelling regions
• Eddies
• Eddy Kinetic Energy

• Enhance local
• production
• Concentrate food
• supplies

Attractive to a wide array of oceanic species
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Importance of oceanic ecosystems - East Coast
Fishery example

• Value
• 28.7 million AUD
• Catch Trend
• Increasing (13 million hooks)
• Species Status
• 4 out of 5 target sp considered
• OVERFISHED

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Spatial Management Options 1. Static

• Enclose year
• round distribution
• of habitats
• Issues
• Large Area
• Static closures BUT
• habitats dynamic
• animals mobile

Alpine Hobday, in review
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Spatial Management Options 2. Dynamic

• More effective ?
• E.g. climate variability
• Reduces overall area
• requirements
• Issues
• Requires real-time
• monitoring capabilities
• Perceived as too difficult

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3
(Data courtesy of AFMA)

• Define eddies
• Fish occurrence within eddies
• Catch data
• Electronic tagging data

Calculate attractiveness of eddies for pelagic
species
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Expected Occurrence 5
Percentage of total fish occurrences within eddy
features
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Expected Occurrence 1.3
Percentage of total fish occurrences within eke
regions
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Conclusions

• Satellite products allow
• identification of
• oceanic habitats
• Pelagic species favour some habitats
• Aggregation Real-time habitat tracking
  candidate regions for DYNAMIC protection
• Adopting a dynamic approach to pelagic
  conservation and fisheries management likely to
  be very effective AND reduce area requirements