Welcome to the home of EASI-Fish

A catch-independent method for quantifying fishery and climate impacts on vulnerable species in data-limited settings

Bycatch is a conservation issue faced by many fisheries worldwide, from small coastal artisanal fisheries to large industrial fisheries that operate on the high seas. Unfortunately, bycatch is often unavoidable in many fisheries due to overlaps in the habitat utilisation and gear selectivity of target and non-target species. Although many fisheries seek ecologically sustainability by minimising bycatch interactions, they often lack sufficient catch data for conventional stock assessment to determine whether their impacts are sustainable. Ecological risk assessment (ERA) has been a popular alternative approach to rapidly identify vulnerable species to prioritise future research, conservation and management efforts.

However, many ERA approaches involve qualitative inputs and/or outputs, do not produce biologically meaningful indicators, and cannot assess the cumulative impacts by multiple fisheries, thereby limiting the ability of managers to make informed conservation and management decisions. The Ecological Assessment of Sustainable Impacts of Fisheries (EASI-Fish) approach was developed by Dr Shane Griffiths to overcome the major limitations of previous ERA approaches. It is a revolutionary catch-independent ERA approach designed specifically for data-limited settings capable of quantifying the cumulative fishing impacts by multiple fishing fleets using conventional biological references points widely used in fisheries sciences.

Since undergoing international peer review and publication in the prestigious Marine Ecology Progress Series journal in 2019 (see full paper here), the method has been applied to dozens of species of sharks, rays, finfishes, sea turtles, marine mammals and seabirds—many listed as critically endangered—across a range of fisheries worldwide from small coastal artisanal fisheries to the largest industrial tuna fisheries in the world. EASI-Fish has been a key tool used by scientists and fishery managers for identifying potentially vulnerable bycatch species, but also to explore the potential efficacy of conservation management measures that can be simulated individually or in various combinations to guide management.

The vulnerability phase plot produced by EASI-Fish clearly identifies 'most vulnerable' species in the red quadrant, which exceeded biological reference points.