Current projects

Research

PROCFish/C

(Pacific Regional Oceanic and Coastal Fisheries project – Comparative Assessment of Reef Fisheries)

The coastal component PROCFish Project is funded by European Union (5.7 million euros) and will last 5 years. It started in March 2002.This project will provide Pacific Island fisheries resource managers (governments and local authorities) with the assistance they need in terms of information along with relevant data to allow comparisons on the status and perspectives of their reef resources. These data will bolster the process of devising reef resource management measures. The project will involve the eight ACP countries targeted by the 8th EDF and the French OCTs. Six people are working specifically on this project (see staff pages). The project is likely to be extended soon to the 6 new ACP countries.

See the PROCFish/C Portal for on-going activities

Regional initiatives

Regional Live Reef Fish Trade Management Strategy

Recruitment of a specialist (Being Yeeting) in 1998 made it possible to both conduct short-term technical assistance activities at countries’ requests and formalize this high priority initiative for member countries. The latter aspect was accomplished through a cooperation agreement signed with three different organizations, i.e. IMA (International Marinelife Alliance), WRI (World Resources Institute) and TNC (The Nature Conservancy). Funding of US$214,943 from the Asian Development Bank allowed the partners to conduct a total of 13 target activities in 2001 which were coordinated by SPC in close collaboration with the island countries involved. TNC’s financial support (US$ 55,000) also helped bolster this initiative. The attribution of new funding from the MacArthur (already approved for a total of US$300,000) and probably from the Packard Foundations, will make it possible to securely establish this initiative's operations over the next three years.

Other projects

Devising and/or improving on-site methods and tools for studying reef and lagoon fisheries

This section aims at improving and validating resource and subsistence fisheries assessment methods at the regional level. This involves standardizing these methods in collaboration with specialists already working in these fields, so as to obtain coherent information which would allow better comparisons and monitoring. Finally, strengthening local capacities within the technical departments of Pacific Island countries is one of the priorities of these activities. For more than two years now, short-term activities have been underway in this area. Since June 2001, activities in this area have received US$78,000 in financial support from France as part of an overall project entitled “Devising and/or improving on-site methods and tools for studying reef and lagoon fisheries”, which includes:

Terminated projects

  ReAT - Reef Resources Assessment Tools

The main goal of this series of tools is to promote the use of standardized methods through practical descriptions on how to use them. The first publication entitled Underwater Visual Fish Census Surveys, is already available for the French version and will be released in December 2001 for the English version. This will be a joint effort with IRD (formely ORSTOM). This is complementary to an initial underwater visual census survey training course, held in 2000 through the financial assistance of the French Cultural Cooperation Fund for the Pacific, made it possible to train 12 fisheries service agents in these methods.

  ReACT – Reef Resources Assessment Calculation Tools 

Under this project the section is a producing a software to enter and process data from underwater visual censuses, which can be downloaded over the Web (see ReACT web pages). This is the first in a series of utility software. This product is already being designed. One people work specifically on this project, Franck Magron.

  TOSURA – Training Optical System for Underwater Resources Assessment

French and Australian funding allowed us to acquire an underwater video camera system (HYTEC Hydrotechnology). A software to automatically count fish through electronic imagery is being designed. After this programme has been finalized, i.e. in about two years, this portable equipment and its operating technician will be made available to requesting countries to assess reef and lagoon resources. Franck Magron is in charge of this project.

ICFMap

FishBase

DemEcoFish     

Role of Demography and Ecology in the Fisheries of Coastal Resources in Pacific Islands

This two year-long project, will finish in October 2003. It is funded by the MacArthur Foundation (US$210,000) and is designed to carry out studies in Tonga and Fiji on the correlation between the potential of available reef ecosystem resources (supply) and fisheries harvests in relation to the growth in island populations (both subsistence and market fishing demand). It also includes a phase for turning over this information, particularly in the form of indicators, to local communities for management purposes. Two people work specifically on this project, i.e. a student research on detachment, Eric Clua, who is already working within the Section, and a social scientist, Mecki Kronen.

CoRéUs

Living Marine Resources of the Pacific Islands, Diversity and Uses

This project is an IRD (formely ORSTOM) research unit, for which SPC is one of the two major partners. It has recently been approved by IRD Scientific Council and began officially in January 2002. It will last four years. Its activities will be situated upstream from both PROCFISH and DemEcoFish, which will be able to benefit from them. CoRéUs proposes implementing a comparative approach to several reef and lagoon ecosystems, using a limited but contrasted number of representative islands in order to study community structure and organization with regards to fisheries exploitation. The objective is to identify those factors which explain the spatial variation of biodiversity, on both local (biotopes, natural and human factors of the environment) and global (biogeography, island type, size, society) scales and to better understand the ecological processes which govern reef and lagoon resources and associated species. The countries and territories involved in the project are New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Wallis and Futuna, Fiji, Tonga, to which must be added the other countries involved in the PROCFISH Project for the second phase of promoting widespread use of the survey methods.