Spanner Crab Fishery Level 1 Ecological Risk Assessment

Abstract

The Queensland Ecological Risk Assessment Guideline (the Guideline) was released in March 2018 as part of the Queensland Sustainable Fisheries Strategy 2017–2027. This Guideline provides an overview of strategy being employed to develop Ecological Risk Assessments (ERAs) for Queensland’s fisheries. The Guideline describes a four-stage framework consisting of a Scoping Study; a Level 1, whole of fishery qualitative assessment; a Level 2, species-specific semi-quantitative or low-data quantitative assessment and; a Level 3 quantitative assessment (if applicable).

The aim of the Level 1 ERA is to produce a broad risk profile for each fishery based on a qualitative ERA method described by Astles et al. (2006). The method considers a range of factors including the current fishing environment (e.g. current catch, effort and licensing trends), limitations of the current management arrangements (e.g. transfer of effort to already saturated markets, substantial increases in fishing mortality for key species, changing target species) and life-history constraints of the species being assessed. In the Spanner Crab Fishery the Level 1 ERA assessed fishing related risks in 15 ecological components including target species, bycatch, marine turtles, sea snakes, crocodiles, dugongs, cetaceans (whales and dolphins), protected teleosts, batoids, sharks, syngnathids, seabirds, terrestrial mammals, marine habitats and ecosystem processes.

The Level 1 ERA indicates that the Spanner Crab Fishery presents a low to negligible risk to most of ecological components. At low/intermediate, target species had the highest risk rating of the assessment. These risks are being managed effectively through a range of measures including a fishery-specific harvest strategy.