CCAMLR

A collaborative project between Australian industry, the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD), Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA), and the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation has been established to investigate the interactions between demersal fishing gears targeting Dissostichus spp. with marine benthos in the Australian EEZ of the Southern Ocean. Key outcomes of this project will include: • Compact camera systems which will be able deployed by scientific observers in the Convention area to quantify habitats types where fishing occurs • Identification of types and likely extent of interactions between different demersal fishing gears (trawl, longline, trap) with benthic communities around Heard and McDonald Islands (Division 58.5.2), and longlines on the Antarctic continental shelf • An assessment of the vulnerability of benthic habitats to impact by demersal gears in the Sub-Antarctic and high latitudes of the Southern Ocean • Recommendations for practical mitigation strategies to minimise fishing impacts on benthic communities Compact cameras have already been built and trialled on trawl on longline gear, and the footage captured indicates there is great potential for such systems to capture data to quantify interactions between demersal gears and the benthos in CCAMRL fisheries.

At the CCAMLR Bioregionalisation Workshop, 13-17 August 2007, it was agreed that physical variables could be used to produce primary physical regionalisations of the Southern Ocean and that benthic and pelagic zones should be considered separately. This paper provides a description of the process and results of the primary benthic regionalisation completed at the Workshop and subsequent refinements to this regionalisation including the use of additional data which could not be incorporated at the Workshop. The process and results of evaluating the physical regionalisation with biological data are also described.