Optimising Compliance Outcomes in Recreational Fisheries

This research questions how best to optimise compliance within the recreational fisher component of the Western Australian (WA) and South Australian (SA) blue swimmer crab fishery. These fisheries present a challenge: minimising management costs and restrictions while maximising recreational fisher enjoyment can be conflicting aims. As a consequence, there is a need to identify optimal education and enforcement strategies that can be demonstrated to work well in a recreational context of low inspection coverage with a cryptic fisher population that lacks licencing or registration requirements to target education. The current project targets an understanding of compliance behaviour by recreational fishers within the WA and SA blue swimmer crab fishery. It will characterise the quality and contents of compliance datasets specific to two recreational blue swimmer crab fisheries held by WA and SA government agencies and evaluate their adequacy for social science research objectives. The project will scope out the resources, expertise and design necessary to show changes in blue swimmer crab fisher attitudes and assess how recreational blue swimmer crab fishers in both jurisdictions obtain information and respond to education and enforcement strategies. Finally, it will determine whether illegal catch can be estimated based on assessment of available data and analysis of drivers of non-compliance.