Development of protocols and guidelines for fishing gear to mitigate the ongoing impact of SIOFA fisheries on vulnerable deepwater sharks, including the definitions of leader and wire and other leader types for longline gear, and the application of move-on rules for demersal longline and trawl fisheries to protect vulnerable deepwater sharks.

This Project aims to address Recommendation number 2 of the SIOFA Performance Review “The Panel recommends that SIOFA CCPs task the Scientific Committee with assessing the status of key shark stocks in the Area and that their status be kept under constant review over the coming years”. This recommendation was considered by the MoP as a High priority and therefore, the project aims to provide a Preliminary quantitative assessment of Portuguese Dogfish determining the level of sustainable catch.

Building upon previous workshops and ongoing efforts by the SC and MoP, this project aims to develop formal harvest strategies for key SIOFA fish stocks.

Project Objectives

This project focuses on developing and scientifically evaluating BRPs for the key fish stocks within the SIOFA Area, based on the best available scientific data and methods.

Project Objectives

This project (PAM‐2024‐01) will develop a Precautionary Approach Framework (PAF) that will enable
SIOFA to meet the objectives of Articles 2 (Objectives) and 4 (General principles) of the SIOFA
Agreement.
The PAF will be approached in a structured way by first developing a conceptual framework, and
second, developing the operational guidelines used to implement the conceptual framework. The PAF
will ultimately provide a fisheries precautionary approach framework that is designed to help ensure
sustainably managed fisheries within the SIOFA Area.

Recent work on alfonsino otoliths has shown that the techniques used to estimate age from otoliths
have severely underestimated the age of these fish (SC‐09‐29). As such a new ageing technique is
needed. This requires the development of a protocol for ageing, training some ages in this technique
and then testing the technique on a sample set of otoliths.
Key to this process is to get a number of fish agers involved from multiple labs so that all otoliths from
the region can be aged using the same techniques.
Objectives:

The SIOFA Scientific Committee (SC) provides scientific advice to the Meeting of Parties (MoP) on the
status of stocks and sustainable yields of deep‐sea fisheries resources. In 2018, the SIOFA Scientific
Committee (SC3) conducted the first orange roughy stock assessments in the SIOFA region and
provided advice to the Meeting of Parties on the stock status and sustainable yields for orange roughy.
An updated orange roughy stock assessment was conducted and presented to SC7 in 2022.