Oral Presentation Australian Society for Fish Biology & Australian Freshwater Sciences Society Conference 2026

Using close kin mark-recapture data to inform harvest strategy development under time varying productivity (145229)

Pia Bessell-Browne 1 , Kristin Privitera-Johnson 1
  1. CSIRO, Hobart

Harvest strategies are a key component of fisheries management. An important element of harvest strategies is the specification of harvest control rules, which determine pre-agreed action for fisheries management based on information about the status of an exploited population. As climate change alters marine ecosystems, we need to ensure that fishery management processes continue to perform as expected, and in some cases this may require the development of new approaches. Close-Kin Mark-Recapture (CKMR) data are becoming increasingly used to assess fish populations. The technique expands on conventional mark-recapture methods by identifying closely related kin pairs using DNA markers. As CKMR data facilitates accurate estimation of absolute abundance, assessments utilising this data can apply a broader range of possible harvest strategy approaches. It also means that assessment and harvest strategies are less reliant on estimates of B0 (biomass of the population before exploitation). This is becoming increasingly important, as climate change drives productivity changes of populations, limiting the relevance of B0 relative to current productivity levels. Therefore, harvest strategies that align with the outputs of assessments using CKMR and that are robust to changing environmental conditions are required. Here we investigate harvest strategy approaches that are suitable for use with CKMR-based assessment inputs and are also robust to changing environmental conditions and test their performance on a school shark (Galeorhinus galeus) like species.