Tuning up the science machine

One way to think of fisheries science is that it's like a machine that runs on data. All you have to do is plug lots of good quality data into one end and you'll get good, reliable answers out other.

Simple right? Not really. If you want your fisheries science to be useful you have to first make sure you're asking the right questions. Then you've got to have enough data to work with - bearing in mind that not all data are created equal. Once you've got that right you need a good way to evaluate your answers so that when you ask the question ‘how many fish can I take out of the water?' you get results you can use.

All of this has to be achieved away from the ordered cleanliness of a laboratory in the real world of budget constraints, time restrictions, and pressures for answers.

That's one of the reasons it was such a big deal when, in 2009, scientists from around the world rated New Zealand as the best in the world at fisheries management - it's hard. Despite all the difficulties, this country has put in place a system which has delivered good results.

But, nice as the endorsement of the international scientific community was, the seafood industry knows there is always room for improvement.

So, with all this in mind, SeaFIC has been working on a science programme, called Trident, which aims to provide our science machine with quality data and make sure it is set up to provide answers that can be used to better manage New Zealand's fisheries.

Why Trident?

Fisheries management typically operates in a loop that looks something like this:

Collect data - assess stock status - evaluate options - alter catch allowance - start again.

In some fisheries, like the Marine Stewardship Council-endorsed hoki fishery, this all works perfectly well and the fishery is able to be managed so that it is abundant while at the same time producing ongoing returns for fishing businesses.

But there are other fisheries where, for a variety of reasons including cost, the loop is broken. Quite often the information is being collected, but it's not being analysed to tell us how many fish are in the water. Without this evaluation, fisheries managers can't properly consider their options, and so they can't make management decisions.

In practice this means there are stocks where, year after year, the Ministry does not make a decision to change catch limits despite growing abundance. Likewise there are fisheries where declines in abundance mean that catches should be reduced to preserve the stock and sustain the business of fishing.

Neither outcome is satisfactory. And it most often occurs in inshore finfish fisheries and some lower value, or ‘tier two', deepwater fisheries. It's these fisheries that Trident is targeting.

The programme is designed around three work streams - think about the three prongs of a trident - which can be summarized as producing more efficient ways to: collect the data, summarise the data and use the data.

""If you want your fisheries science to be useful you have to first make sure you’re asking the right questions. Then you’ve got to have enough data to work with – bearing in mind that not all data are created equal.""

Part one – collect the data

Trident's first work stream is about the efficient collection of catch sampling data for inshore finfish fisheries.

The Ministry currently hires research providers to collect biological data from the catch of inshore finfish and then sends industry the bill, an arrangement known as cost recovery. But it's not an easy task for these research providers. The inshore fisheries comprise many small boats, operating at different times in different areas.

For this reason data about the inshore catch have generally been collected onshore. But this presents its own logistical and practical obstacles - it can be difficult to ensure ready access to the factories at the right times. On top of that there's the issue of price. Like all contractors, research providers build their overheads into their invoice.

Industry believes it can be done better, for less. Trident's solution is to remove the middle man and for industry to collect its own inshore finfish data. After all, says SeaFIC science manager David Middleton, it has the best access to the catch.

But the idea of giving industry control of collecting fisheries data is sure to make some people uncomfortable. The question would be asked ‘what's to stop industry from cooking the books to get more catch?'

One very strong motivator is vested commercial interest - good information leads to good management decisions, and ultimately that makes the fishing business profitable. But at the same time no one would deny that public perception plays a role in fisheries management. In order to allay those fears, there would have to be a high level of transparency in the way the data is collected, says David.

And the public isn't the only group that would need to have confidence in the data. Any information collected under Trident would need to have the confidence of the Ministry to be useful.

"If MFish don't think industry is doing a good job there is no cost saving because it will come along and do it again."

Trident proposes that the job of meeting those expectations, and achieving the efficiencies it's after, should rest with a central industry-run entity. It would be tasked with co-ordinating data collection, sampling, looking after the data, conducting quality control, and providing training for samplers. It will provide feedback to participants so that they see the ongoing value of the sampling.

The important consideration is that the new entity does the job more efficiently than the current system, says David.

“Counting fish is like counting trees, except they are invisible and they keep moving.”

"We intend to flexibly use industry resources to do the sampling. And usually that means someone who is already working in the factory.

"We've had a pilot programme with AFL and Sanford for the last couple of years and essentially all that's happened is that we've had someone go in and train some of their staff to do the sampling. We've given them the procedures and the forms and they've done the sampling as part of their normal job. Then they've provided the data back to us and we've done the quality control and audit processes."

 

 

That's one way it could work but, David says, it doesn't necessarily have to be like that at all factories.

"Once you begin to talk to people they come up with options to make it work using existing resources. In some of the smaller ports, for instance, you can envisage that the factories might be sufficiently small that they would share a sampler between several factories."

Part two – summarise the data

This Trident work-stream aims to get better value from fisheries data. One of the things Trident has identified is that in many cases fisheries managers are not able to get value out of the information that has been collected.

"The point here is that our fisheries are data-rich and our catch, effort and landings data are really world class, but we tend to lock the data up and throw away the key. The data are good, but they are very well-guarded and are not really utilized easily," says David.

The problem from industry's point of view is that the Ministry owned data are protected - for very good reasons around privacy and intellectual property - with a set of stringent access requirements.

Industry can get access to it in an aggregated format and research providers that have signed a confidentiality agreement with the Ministry can access data at the full resolution so long as when they're reporting the analysis they abide by particular rules.

"That all works reasonably well, but it's a fairly longwinded and time consuming process. When you've got a particular question that you think can be answered by the data you have to do a data request which has to be approved by the Ministry before you can do the analysis. So you typically allow three weeks to get the data."

In practice that means the process prevents investigation into all but the most important questions, and a lot of little questions, that could easily be answered by the data, go unanswered.

One way that Trident proposes to wring more value from the data already collected is by producing fisheries characterisations. This is where the data are used to produce standardized graphical summaries of fisheries. It's essentially a lot of graphs which enable fisheries managers to get a lot of information about trends in an entire fishery and the relationship between stocks.

It's not a new idea, the industry and the Ministry have already done a few.

""That doesn’t believe that getting meaningful answers about fish populations is impossible, but when perfection means laying your eyes on every single fish you need to come at the problem in a number of different ways.""

"When the first one arrived it was a real revelation to see the data presented in a common, consistent format, such that you could genuinely understand the structure of the fisheries. Because before that we tended to look at it from a stock specific perspective and it wasn't clear what the linkages were between say the elephant fisheries and the rig fishery."

But, useful as they are, the existing characterisations are either infrequent, or not comprehensive. Trident proposes to use industry resources to make characterisations an annual event, recognizing the value of having current information readily to hand.

"We would want to make these characterizations available via some sort of website interface that allows users to drill down at different levels. It's certainly not the only analysis that we'd have to do to manage fisheries, but it does use the data that we have available in a much more informative way.

"We see it as having clear benefits for fisheries managers, but also valuable for communicating to the public that we have really good fisheries data in New Zealand and we know quite a lot about our fisheries."

Part three – use the data

It's here that Trident aims to make real differences to the way that things are currently done. The current system puts a lot of emphasis on the measurement side of fisheries science and much less attention is paid to rationally evaluating options.

"The options we currently evaluate in the fisheries science process tend to be at the level of different allowable catch options rather than asking the question about the whole system - are we collecting the right data? Are we assessing things in the right way?" says David.

To understand the conundrum around how to best use fisheries data, it's useful first to revisit British fisheries scientist John Shepherd's wry observation about the nature of fisheries science: "counting fish is like counting trees, except they are invisible and they keep moving."

That doesn't mean that getting meaningful answers about fish populations is impossible. But when perfection means laying eyes on every single fish, you need to come at the problem in a number of different ways.

Some ways of collecting fisheries data produce better results that others. But importantly, if you're smart about the way you treat the so-called ‘lower quality' data, you can still get very useful answers.

Here's a way to think about the two key forms of data collection. Say you're at a party and you want a record of the people who are there. You get yourself in a good position in the corner of the room and you take a picture. It's not perfect - you can't see everyone's face and there might be some people in the kitchen or in the toilet - but it's still highly accurate.

Now you've got a really good piece of data which you can reliably point to and say - ‘at the time this picture was taken, these people were at the party.'

If you wait a couple of hours, the picture will still be a decent indicator of who is in the room, but it won't be quite as reliable as it was at the moment the picture was taken. Some people might have left, some people might have come in.

A couple of days after the picture was taken the photo will not be able to give you a reliable indicator of who is in the room, but it will serve pretty well as a historical document which you can refer to anytime you want an idea of who was at the party at that time.

The more pictures you took through the course of the party, the more confidently you'd be able to put your hand on your heart and say ‘this is who was at the party'.

Trawl surveys are a lot like this. They give you a good snapshot of what is in a fishery and if you do enough of them you'll have high quality data about a fishery over time, which you can use to make predictions and help you decide where to set catch allowances. From a purely scientific point of view surveys should be done on a regular basis for every fishery.

But it doesn't work like that in the real world.

High earning fisheries, like hoki, hake and ling, use trawl surveys very effectively, and the Ministry of Fisheries is able to look at that data and make regular adjustments to catch allowance.

But many smaller inshore fisheries managers can't call on regular trawl surveys to tell them how many fish are in a given fishery - it's just too expensive. They have to find other ways to tell them how many fish are in the water and how many they can take out.

One potentially useful measure is called catch per unit of effort, or CPUE.

So, getting back to the party, let's say you can't afford a camera, but you still want an idea of who was there over a period of time. You can corner some of the partygoers as they leave the room and ask them who they saw. No one individual is going to give you a full picture of the party because they may not have gone everywhere in the room or they may have left before the band came on. But if you ask enough people over a long enough period of time you can build up a decent picture of who was in the room.

CPUE works on a similar basis. Essentially, this method surveys fishermen and asks them how many fish they caught and how much they fished. They are then able to say ‘this amount of fishing effort in this fishery caught this amount of fish.'

If, like a lot of New Zealand inshore fisheries, you collect a lot of catch data over a decent period of time, you can turn that into CPUE and start to spot trends. Once you've established trends, you can use this to monitor the fishery. And that information will give you a good steer as to how many fish you can take out.

Creating cost effective management tools

Not all inshore fisheries lack data. New Zealand's rock lobster fisheries, for example, are information rich and use that data in an ingenious way.

Every five years or so, the rock lobster fisheries go through a stock assessment to get a high quality head count of the fish in the water.

This information becomes the benchmark. Fisheries scientists can then use the accepted assumptions about things like fish mortality and movement to predict (or model) how the fishery will perform under various types of fishing pressure.

These are combined into what is known as ‘decision rules', which is essentially a scientific basis for saying "if CPUE reaches this level, we should adjust the allowable catch to this."

Under this approach stock assessments can be done less frequently to both check on the health of the fisheries and check that the decision rule is working well.

David calls this the Rolls Royce option. It's nice and shiny and does the job beautifully, albeit at some cost. But just because a fishery can't afford a Rolls, it shouldn't have to walk.

One of Trident's proposals is to put the less well-heeled fisheries into Daewoo Hatchbacks and Toyota Corollas using a piece of industry funded science called Rapid Management Evaluation Procedure.

It's a procedure which provides fisheries managers with decision rules for managing fisheries, even if traditional stock assessment is proving a hurdle. The quantity and quality of information is still important. If you've got lots of good quality information, then the potential decision rules are likely to allow higher yields. If you aren't as data rich, you need to be more conservative and accept rules that provide lower average catches.

However, in both cases it is still possible to provide a scientific basis for decision making. It gives fisheries managers more freedom to weigh up the pros and cons of spending up large on science.

What next?

SeaFIC is taking the programme to industry to seek its feedback, and financial backing.

The Ministry, which has already been involved in the process of developing Trident, is also essential to the programme's success.

"Ultimately we've got to take the Ministry along with us, we've got to work within their quality assurance processes, we've got to explain to them what we're doing and how we're doing it, and to be entirely transparent about it so that they recognise it as something that they want to use rather than something that they don't want to use."

For more information about Trident, contact David Middleton, david.middleton@seafood.co.nz