Conservation & Management
The following summary is extracted from the following publication: click on the image to download a pdf.
John D. Stevens, Colin A. Simpfendorfer and Malcolm Francis
The Southwest Pacific, Australasia and Oceania region encompasses Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and numerous Pacific Island states. Its western boundary is 130ºW and the eastern boundary is 70ºE, although for the purposes of this chapter, we report only on information from between 160ºW (to the Cook Islands) and 100ºE (approximately the western boundary of the Australia Fishing Zone). Within these boundaries are substantial areas of open ocean in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, also exploited by nations from outside the region, especially for tunas and billfish. Habitats range from tropical to temperate and polar. Much of the data on fishery catches are taken from United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) landings statistics, together with data produced by individual nations. The region includes parts of FAO Areas 51, 57, 58, 71 and 81. It also officially includes the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya, but the difficulties of separating fishery statistics for a single country within the same ocean has resulted in the whole of Indonesia being included in the Northwest Pacific region for the purposes of this report.
Landings of sharks within the region are not as large as in some of the neighbouring regions. However, the commercial shark fisheries within two of the nations – Australia and New Zealand – are among the most researched, managed and documented in the world. Recreational fisheries that take elasmobranchs are also well developed. As such there is a wealth of information and data available for these countries that are reflected, at least in part, in the length of the sections discussing these countries in this report. Elasmobranch fisheries and landings are more poorly documented in other nations of the region.
Management and conservation
Australian and New Zealand shark populations are among the best researched and managed in the world. There are established research and monitoring programmes in all fisheries, with stock assessments produced regularly and used in the setting of management measures. Several of the fisheries in these countries are managed using Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs) and/or effort controls. The research and management of fisheries in other nations in this region is limited. Australia is one of the few nations which has a Shark Assessment Report (SAR) (Rose and SAG 2001) and a National Plan of Action for the Conservation and Management of Sharks (NPOA) (SAG and Lack 2004) under the guidelines of the FAO International Plan of Action for Sharks (IPOA-Sharks), see Fowler and Cavanagh (this volume).
Elasmobranch species within the region that are currently considered to have high conservation needs include sawfishes (all Pristidae spp.), river sharks (all Glyphis spp.) the Maugean skate Dipturus sp. and the grey nurse shark (or sand tiger) Carcharias taurus. At the time of writing Australia had listed six species of elasmobranchs under their Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) (Table 7.9). New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Pacific Island States do not have special conservation regulations for any species of elasmobranch.