Wednesday, 2nd December Australian Society for Fish Biology & Australian Freshwater Sciences Society Conference 2026

Science-Management Forum - Introductory Plenary
- Margret Murphy, AFS President, USA
- Mike Steer, Research Director of SARDI, South Australia
- Resource Manager (TBC)

• Bridging the Gap between Fisheries Management, Fish Health, and Fish Culture - Margaret H Murphy
• Managing the Unprecedented: Lessons from South Australia’s Harmful Algal Bloom for Science, Policy and Management - Mike Steer

• It's getting hot in here (again)... are we better prepared this time? - Alistair J Hobday
• Enhancing climate preparedness for fisheries across temporal scales - Curtis Champion
• Preparing Australian fisheries for a summer of extremes: climate and ecosystem reporting as a tool for climate readiness - Stephanie Brodie
• Developing a state natural marine emergency response plan for Western Australia - Gary Jackson
• Climate variability and change in Torres Strait marine ecosystems - Laura Blamey
• Integrated Science, Monitoring and Governance in Response to South Australia’s 2025/26 Harmful Algal Bloom - Gretchen Grammer
• Responding to South Australia’s 2025 Karenia bloom through scaled Harmful Algal Bloom monitoring and cross sector partnerships  - Vinuri Silva
• Assessing the impact of harmful algal blooms on fisheries and fish stocks in Gulf St Vincent and Spencer Gulf - Stephen Mayfield

• Do habitat complexity and flow interact to influence fish recruitment in the Murray-Darling Basin? Lessons for environmental flow management across spatial scales - Luke M McPhan
• Management of cyanobacterial blooms in freshwater: learnings from Tasmania  - Andy Taylor
• Nutritional ecology for species conservation: understanding predator responses to environmental change - Emily Hunt
• How Long Does Low Flow Matter? Taxon-Specific Responses of Stream Invertebrates Reveal Hidden Effects of Antecedent Low Flow - Andrew J Brooks
• Applying predictive species distribution models to improve the sustainable management of sea cucumber fisheries. - Kristen L McSpadden
• Seeing the forest and the trees: integrating small-scale environmental variation, community composition, and species interactions over the landscape - Galen Holt
• Stratified spatially balanced sampling best detects spatial closure effects on fish. - Lise Fournier-Carnoy
• Functional indicators of food-web responses to flow across the Murray-Darling Basin: Introducing the Water Packet Poker project - Darren Giling

• Lachlan Kalari Bila: Sweet Water by the Ocean. A collection of stories from Traditional Owners. - Will Higgisson
• Integrate local knowledge into sampling design for eDNA long-term fish monitoring program  - Tina TC Corradi
• Rebooting estuarine monitoring – How can environmental DNA help redefine fish baselines in Australia? - Maarten De Brauwer
• Piscivore: An autonomous predator observation system for monitoring pelagic ecosystems - Ciara Willis
• Adaptive management to optimise long-term stream monitoring network design in the face of change - Vaughn Grey
• From Monitoring to Operational Forecasting of Inland Water Quality: The AquaWatch Australia Framework - Duy Nguyen
• Evaluating digital monitoring approaches for fisheries assessment - Ana Paula Barbosa Martins
• Marine predators as ‘ecosystem sentinels’: bridging the gap between ecological inference and fisheries management - Gemma Carroll

• Establishing baseline flow conditions for future management: are we overthinking this or have we been underthinking this? - Douglas J Green
• From Flow Delivery to Ecosystem Resilience: Environmental Water Management at a Crossroads in the Goulburn River - Daniel Lovell
• Flow regime and flow velocity shape functional and structural patterns in intermittent streams: Implications for biodiversity and environmental flow management - Sally Maxwell
• Regulation, Inundation frequency, and the recovery of billabong vegetation from soil seed banks - Alexandra Cseri
• Managing environmental flows for platypus breeding success - Chris Leung
• Between a hot place and hypoxia: using ecohydrology models to assess risks for native fish in Queensland’s inland rivers - Ryan Shojinaga
• Long-term responses of cyanobacteria to external nutrient reductions: evidence from 45 years of monitoring. - Jordan Facey
• Making the most of monitoring: aligning and revising vegetation survey methods within and between major monitoring programs to improve effectiveness - Chris S Jones

• Commercial fisheries in Australia: challenges and responses, a perspective - Sean Tracey
• Indigenous fisheries and Sea Country –  a model for collaboration between fisheries agencies and Indigenous nations now and in the future - Nicholas McClean
• Bridging the gap between climate science and fisheries governance - Natalie Couchman
• Loss of ecological memory? How fishing can disrupt migratory behaviour in exploited fish stocks - John Morrongiello
• Assessing sea mullet in a changing seascape: climate variability, uncertainty and competing hypotheses - Robyn Lovett
• A weight-of-evidence approach to assessing recovery of a depleted estuarine fish stock - Koster Sarakinis
• Differential impacts of climate variability on fish distributions can foster fisheries adaptability: insights from the Pacific - Juan Wang
• Beyond climate impacts: lessons from a national knowledge-exchange approach to climate adaptation in Australian fisheries and aquaculture - Gretta Pecl

• Getting back in the flow: Water quality recovery after bushfire  - Sally Hladyz
• Benchmarking reef fish physiology through a real marine heatwave: Lessons from the 2016 Great Barrier Reef bleaching event for the 2026/27 summer outlook - Jodie L Rummer
• Managing range-extending fisheries under climate change: recreational effort, allocation between sectors, and post-release mortality in a two-site model - Alexandre Tisseaux Navarro
• Do pre-disturbance fish communities shape coral responses to marine heat stress? - Tiffany Sih
• Variation in abalone responses to future warming condition across life stages and regions: A meta-analysis - Idham S Pratama
• Risk to deep reefs: surface and seafloor divergence in marine heatwave risk across continental shelf communities - Stephanie Woolley
• Warming Waters, Shifting Fish: Reef Fish Assemblage Change and the Potential Role of Deeper Reefs Across Southwestern Australia. - Jack RC Parker

Session will be followed by a panel discussion

• Does biodiversity influence responses to, and recovery from, disturbance? - Belinda Robson
• From local observations to broader patterns: integrating UAVs and net sampling to understand tropical small pelagic fish assemblages - Paulina Okpei
• One amphipod genus, many stories: what hidden diversity means for evolution, monitoring and conservation. - Edward Tsyrlin
• From bubbles to budgets: how fine-scale methane dynamics shape greenhouse gas estimates for freshwater reservoirs - Carolyn Maxwell
• Headwater stream macroinvertebrate community responses to novel riparian buffer design under forestry clear cutting - Bridget E White
• Freshwater fish across scales: using hierarchical species distribution models to capture the ecological niche. - Patricia Y. Koh
• Assumptions make an ASS of U & ME: Do hydropeaking flows really cause mass mortality of aquatic insect eggs? - Wim Bovill

Session will be followed by a panel discussion

• Development of a scalable, cost-effective socio-economic monitoring framework for coastal recreational fisheries - Nicholas McClean
• UAV-based radio telemetry reveals carp movement responses to environmental flows in a regulated floodplain wetland - Samuel Nolan
• The Potential of Satellite Vessel Detections for Small-Scale Fisheries Monitoring and Management - Mazen Shafea
• Independent validation of fishing activity using electronic monitoring to improve reporting in northern Australian pelagic net fisheries - Emily Taljaard
• From models to management: making artificial intelligence accessible through dashboards for scalable fish monitoring - Alison McNamara
• AI-supported monitoring in recreational and charter fisheries: towards national coordination - Joni Pini-Fitzsimmons

Session will be followed by a panel discussion

Panelists: Geoff Tuck (CSIRO), Julian Hughes (NSW DPI), Fisheries Manager - Fang Zhao (NRETAS), and Alison McNamara (Fish ID, Groffith Uni).

• Subpixel-based Vegetation Detection and Evaluation in Drylands by Integrating Multiple Deep/Machine Learning Methods and RS-Drone Data - Rui Liu
• Understanding waterbird abundance and richness responses to floodplain inundation to inform management in the Murray-Darling Basin - Micha V Jackson
• From patches to portfolios: scaling ecosystem vulnerability across the Murray–Darling Basin - Shane Brooks
• Can Technical Guidance Documents provide a framework for assessing Basin-scale outcomes? - Cherie J Campbell
• What Can We Legitimately Infer About Ecological Recovery? Lessons from Two Decades of Monitoring in the Murray–Darling Basin  - Jarod Lyon
• Long-term monitoring is not enough: the need for complementary research to inform causal understanding in long-term data sets - Angus Webb

Session will be followed by a panel discussion

• Review of Australia's National Guidelines to Develop Fishery Harvest Strategies and lessons from a decade of implementation - Nicholas Giles
• Assessing data limited stocks in a warming ecosystem: what to trust when assessments conflict - Rikki J Taylor
• Rethinking Catchability as a Dynamic Property of Fish-Fisher Systems for Adaptive Management Under Environmental Change - Zoe Storm
• Developing climate-adaptive and multi-species harvest strategies - Daniel Corrie
• Why closing longer catches more fish: recovery planning under repeated marine heatwaves in the Tasmanian abalone fishery - Katie Cresswell
• Bridging the gap: Transitioning stock assessment models in the context of environmental change in South Australia - Camille Mellin

Session will be followed by a panel discussion

• Stream invertebrates and energy flow - Richard Marchant