CCAMLR

The Third Meeting of the ACAP’s Advisory Committee was held in Valdivia, Chile from 19 – 22 June 2007. It was preceded by meetings of the Status and Trends Working Group on 16 June and the Seabird Bycatch Working Group on 17-18 June 2007. This paper provides a summary of the major outcomes of the meeting.

Australia’s sub-Antarctic and Antarctic fisheries observer program is administered by the Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA), with technical and data management support from the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD). Australian observers work on both trawl and longline vessels targeting finfish in the CCAMLR area. As the assessments and conservation measures employed by CCAMLR increase in sophistication, the tasks required to be completed by observers are increasing in number and complexity. Such a set of qualities is rarely available ‘off the shelf’. To ensure that observers in these fisheries are able to complete the broad range of task required under the CCAMLR System of International Scientific Observation (SISO) and under domestic legislation, a system of performance management and data quality assurance has been developed. This system covers all aspects of the observers’ experience in the work place, from initial recruitment through training, accreditation and ongoing performance assessment. Australia considers the use of such a performance management system to be essential in ensuring that high quality data continues to be collected by SISO.

This paper describes French fishery targeting Patagonian Toothfish inside CCAMLR area, what are the data collected and how they are checked, a short description of prioritisation of observer’s task is given.

SeaBird is a generalised age- and/or stage-structured seabird population dynamics model that allows a great deal of flexibility in specifying the population dynamics, parameter estimation, and model outputs. The manual provides information on how to use SeaBird, including how to run it, how to set up the input files, descriptions of the population dynamics and estimation methods, and how to generate outputs. It also contains a brief overview of the technical specifications of the software, and examples of models using SeaBird. SeaBird is designed for flexibility. It allows the user to structure the modelled population in the way that best suits the available data. Depending on these data the user may which to specify the population structure using some or all of the following characteristics: age, life stage (e.g., immature or mature), sex, or behaviour (e.g., in any year mature birds may be classified as breeders or non-breeders). Interactions with fisheries can be modelled and the user can choose the sequence of events in a model year. A wide variety of types of data can be used. Estimation can be by maximum likelihood or Bayesian. As well as generating point estimates of the parameters of interest, SeaBird can calculate likelihood or posterior profiles and can generate Bayesian posterior distributions using Monte Carlo Markov Chain methods. SeaBird can project population status into the future under various alternative scenarios. SeaBird was designed to share many features and concepts with the fishery stock assessment model CASAL (Bull et al. 2005) and users of the latter program will find it easy to adapt to SeaBird. However, there are some important differences between the programs that are described.