Setting Quotas Using Provisional Data: A Case Study From The South Australian Abalone Fisheries (Vol 50, Pg 371, 2016)

Stock assessments of quota or effort managed fisheries in which the duration of the fishing season is 12 months are invariably delivered well into the subsequent fishing season. As a result, quotas are frequently based on year-old data. This delay is often unavoidable because it may take months to collect, collate and analyse data necessary to assess fishery performance. The South Australian fisheries for blacklip (Haliotis rubra Leach, 1814) and greenlip abalone (H. laevigata Donovan, 1808) have addressed this issue by using provisional data on current stock status to inform application of the harvest strategy decision rules that set the quota for the next year. The primary index of relative abundance for these fisheries is catch per unit effort (CPUE). Our study uses 25 years (1988-2012) of CPUE data to quantify the differences between the provisional and complete-season CPUE estimates at the spatial scales used to assess the fisheries. We demonstrate that, in most cases, there was a strong relationship between the provisional and complete-season CPUE estimates for both species, with little evidence of bias. As the provisional CPUE estimates were a reliable and accurate predictor of the complete-season CPUE estimates, this provides a high degree of confidence in using provisional CPUE estimates to set quotas, thereby overcoming the difficulty of basing decisions on aged data. These findings are likely to be applicable to other fisheries, particularly those where much of the annual catch is obtained (or effort expended) in a short time period at the commencement of the fishing season.