CCAMLR

Harvesting of marine living resources in the Southern Ocean is managed by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR).  CCAMLR is widely known for its ecosystem-approach to managing fisheries with the maintenance of ecological relationships included in the conservation objectives.  In the late 1980s, the precautionary approach of CCAMLR was developed, incorporating principles of how to use scientific evidence in the decision making process.  Even though this approach was based on the management of single species (Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba), it takes account of the needs of predators in the assessment of catch limits.  The success of this process is due to the formulation of a management procedure, which has decision rules that specify how harvest controls will be adjusted based on the scientific information available and the assessments that arise from such information.  To assist the Commission in meeting its objectives, the CCAMLR Ecosystem Monitoring Program (CEMP) was set up to detect the effects of fishing on krill predators.  CCAMLR needs to adopt a management procedure which has a great chance of maintaining ecological relationships and meeting the needs of predators, incorporating (i) operational objectives that articulate the target conditions of relevant aspects of the system, (ii) methods for assessing the status of the system, (iii) decision rules on how to adjust harvest controls given the difference between the assessment and the agreed objectives, and (iv) methods for dealing with uncertainty.  This paper reviews progress in developing ecosystem-based management procedures by summarising the gaps in the existing approach, the types of models developed for the Antarctic marine ecosystem, the implications of the large-scale of the fishery for designing a monitoring program to detect the effects of fishing, and the types of procedures already proposed for managing the krill fishery.  It highlights the need to focus the future work in these three areas, including the need to evaluate candidate management procedures in advance of the expansion of the krill fishery.  Most importantly, operational objectives for dependent species and feasible management options need to be clearly articulated to guide this work.

Commercial krill fishing vessels can provide useful data for science and management. The use of such vessels as platforms for survey transects under scientific supervision has already been demonstrated. Here we show that acoustic data of good quality can be collected by observers on board during normal fishing operations in a relatively easy and cheap manner using the Norwegian vessel ‘Saga Sea’ in 2011 as example. A one-month subset of the acoustic data from February/March was processed within a time-frame of a week and linked to krill length data from the same period. The data from the fishing operations were very different from transect data collected just some days before. Krill concentrations were in general much higher during fishing and the length distribution was different. This was expected from the very concentrated geographical positioning of the vessel and intensive fishing during the period. The data have the potential of providing information about local krill depletion, fishing patterns and diel and seasonal behavior of krill. Based on the last years experience with the Norwegian krill fishing vessels and previous experience in own waters we advocate that increased collaboration with commercial vessels should be aimed at.

During the 2011 season, 22 scientific observation programs were conducted by 9 national and 13 internationally designated scientific observers on board krill vessels operating in the Convention Area.  For the 2012 season, 11 observer programs have been reported, with data available for 2 of these used in this report.

This document outlines a proposal from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) to provide a Geographical Information System (GIS) for CCAMLR.  The proposal offers a web-based GIS that will provide state-of-the-art capacity for managing spatial data for CCAMLR, particularly the types of information managed by WG-EMM. It also proposes joint working with the Secretariat to enable capacity building in handling geographic information, and a phased handover of system development and maintenance to the Secretariat.

BAS is well-placed to offer these geographic information services, with over 10 years of experience in developing award-winning web-based GIS and spatial data access systems.

The proposal offers a staged approach involving different levels of complexity and commitment. At this stage the document only includes indicative costs but can be followed up with a more detailed, fully-costed proposal.

An analysis of the observer data provided from the krill fishery was undertaken using a range of  complementary methods of data quality control and variance investigation. A sample pooling approach analysis on the other hand revealed the distribution of variance in krill length at different scales and indicated that krill hauled in a given month/season/area were similar enough to be pooled to compute monthly length frequency distributions. Linear Mixed Models were used to remove systematic variability in  krill length due to seasons, months and areas and this allowed estimates of variance components associated with different vessels and observers to be obtained; these were found to be statistically significant and a made a substantial contribution to the overall random variation. Recommendations for future sampling scheme, including the  potential for an adaptive responding to the variability in krill population structure are both provided and invited.

Brazil has been requested to coordinate the implementation of the review of the Management Plan for the Antarctic Specially Managed Area (ASMA) No. 1, Admiralty Bay, King George Island, South Shetland Archipelago (herein called the Area). The objective of this paper is to inform CCAMLR about the process for the revision and to ask for input into that process following the procedures described in ATCM Decision 9 (2005).

A data checking and validation process was undertaken for the data held in the CCAMLR Ecosystem Monitoring Programme database.  An outcome from this this analysis has provided an opportunity to examine the temporal patterns in the available time series as well as inter-site and inter-species comparisons. A series of questions designed to improve the understanding of the characteristics of different paramters is provided for discussion by the Working Group.

The 2nd international workshop on the ICED Southern Ocean Sentinel was held at CCAMLR Headquarters on 7-11 May 2012 in Hobart, Australia, hosted by the Australian Antarctic Division and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre.  This paper provides a preliminary report on the discussion on strategies for measuring change in Southern Ocean marine ecosystems, including ship-based and land-based monitoring and integrated studies.  The workshop agreed a work plan for benchmarking Southern Ocean ecosystems in 2020 and for establishing routine activities for estimating change in those ecosystems.  As part of ICED and contributing to Theme 6 Biology of the Southern Ocean Observing System, this program of work will build on the work of the CCAMLR Ecosystem Monitoring Program, GLOBEC and other international programs.  It is recommended that the Scientific Committee of CCAMLR become involved in this work, particularly through the Working Group on Ecosystem Monitoring and Management and the experts involved in the CCAMLR Ecosystem Monitoring Program.  The outcomes of this work will be important for CCAMLR in measuring the status and trends of Southern Ocean ecosystems, particularly in support of developing management procedures for fisheries and in conserving marine biodiversity.

Studies related to the abundance and reproductive distribution of marine birds have the potential to act as ecological indicators. The western Antarctic Peninsula is one of the three sites in the world with some of the clearest signals of climate warming. The aim of this study was to monitor the distribution and abundance of breeding populations of chinstrap penguin (Pygoscelis antarctica) and gentoo penguin (Pygoscelis papua) in the northern sector of the Danco Coast, north-west of the Antarctic Peninsula during the breeding season 2010-2011. Our results showed an overall increase in both populations in relation the 1998. Since the effects of climate change and human harvesting could confound underlying ecological mechanisms, this study highlights the need to strengthen population monitoring studies.

We describe the use of a GIS-based Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) tool designed to aid the development and transparent evaluation of MPA scenarios with reference to spatially explicit protection objectives and cost layers representing rational use in a systematic conservation planning framework.  The MSP tool has been customised to enable rapid set-up and use in any of the nine CCAMLR MPA planning domains.