The introduction of the Status of Australian Fish Stocks process is generally considered to be an excellent initiative. However, the common reporting template assumes a single homogeneous stock. Abalone do not conform to this assumption and stock status assessment is intrinsically difficult because the stocks are typically spatially structured, utilise small vessels, target sedentary species, and are prone to serial depletion. Currently there are disagreements regarding how best to derive a meaningful overall stock status indicator for abalone.

This project addresses this problem by:

• characterising the statistical properties, coherence, interpretability and assumptions of spatial and classic indicators of fishery performance;
• developing methods for inclusion of fine-scale spatial data in catch per unit effort (CPUE) standardisations;
• identifying methods for detecting hyper-stability in CPUE; and
• determine feasibility of spatial data based stock status determination in spatially structured fisheries.