Location: Indonesia

Lab Personnel: Donna Dimarchopoulou, Elle Wibisono

Collaborators: Peter Mous (The Nature Conservancy)

Goal: Provide data for fisheries management plans of the deepwater snapper-grouper fishery using collaborative data collection, expert-informed length-based assessment methods, and simulation models.

Significance: This work provides continuously updated life-history parameters for over 100 fish species which are used in a stock assessment model customized for this fishery, ultimately aiming to formulate recommendations on stock status and sustainable harvest control rules.

Background: Deepwater demersal fisheries in Indonesia yielded close to 90,000 metric tons of fish in 2019, landed by a fleet of approximately 11,000 fishing boats. Before this project, information on these dispersed small- to medium-scale fisheries was scarce, while reliable species-specific data on catch and effort were non-existent. This data-deficiency has made stock assessments impossible and thus harvest control rules could not be implemented. We have developed an ongoing Crew-Operated Data Recording System (CODRS) to efficiently collect species- and length-composition data from catches across all segments of the fleet and Indonesian fisheries management areas. Using more than 2 million CODRS data points, we have been able to update life-history parameters (i.e., asymptotic length, size at maturity, optimum fishing length, total mortality, and spawning potential ratio) for the top 50 species based on the maximum observed length in the catch.

Scientific Milestones: A paper on the identification of hotspots for placement of marine protected areas was published in December 2020. We also have a paper on the methods in Environmental Biology of Fishes. More manuscripts are currently under review.

Funding: US Agency for International Development (USAID), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), The David and Lucile Packard Foundation