Fishing for reef fish is a major industry in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park with a number of different sectors accessing the fishery. Commercial line fishing, recreational, charter boat and traditional fishing is conducted as well as non-fishing industries such as the tourist dive industry. Such multiple-use requires highly developed management regimes to ensure that exploitation of the resource is sustainable in the long term. Such management needs relevant information about the resource.

Reef line fishing

The Effects of Line Fishing (ELF) project is investigating reef line fishing in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area and the effect this fishing has on fish stocks and other inhabitants of the reef. The project started in 1995 and involves researchers, fishers, managers and other stakeholders in collaborative work that will aid fisheries management in the future. The ELF experiment is a large-scale experiment that will provide a great deal of information about the line fishing resource to the ELF Project.

CRC Reef research on line fishing on the Great Barrier Reef concentrates of three main areas:

• Fish biology - includes information about the biology of many of the fish species that are caught in the reef line fishery. This includes information about their growth, reproduction and natural mortality. This information is vital for managers to determine what management strategies will be most effective.
• Queensland Reef Line Fishery - characteristics of the various fishing sectors, including where they fish, how often they fish and what they catch.
• The Fishers and how fisheries management impacts them - The results from the ELF Project will be made available to fisheries managers, and stakeholder groups who make decisions on what management strategies are needed for the Great Barrier Reef line fishery. This information will help these people make informed management decisions.