Current projects
Vulnerability and adaptation of coastal fisheries to climate change
With funding assistance from the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), and in relation with an ongoing assessment of the vulnerability of coastal fisheries to climate change, the Secretariat of the Pacific Community has launched a project to assist Pacific Island countries and territories (PICTs) to design and field-test monitoring pilot projects to determine whether changes are occurring in the productivity of coastal fisheries and, if changes are found, to identify the extent to which such changes are due to climate change as opposed to other causes.
For more information, please check the Project's webpages.
SciCOFish (Scientific support for the management of Coastal and Oceanic FISHeries in the Pacific Islands Region)
The SciCOFish project provides a reliable and improved scientific basis for management and decision making in oceanic and coastal fisheries, giving P-ACP countries the means to develop efficient management measures, the skills to monitor their effectiveness, and some important tools to combat IUU fishing on the high seas.The oceanic activities provide scientific support for new tuna management initiatives adopted by P-ACPs at a critical time for conservation of the stocks, in particular, intensive observer training and enhancement of national fishing activity databases.The coastal activities are focused on projects combining an urgent resource management issue with a strong local capability to address the issue and maintain a long-term programme.
Terminated Projects
Over the years, and under many different names, CFSMS has participated in numerous projects. You'll find here a non-exhaustive list of the most recent ones.
PROCFish / CoFish
The Pacific Regional Oceanic and Coastal Fisheries (PROCFish) project was funded by the European Development Fund (EDF) and implemented by the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC). The project was initiated in March 2002.
The coastal component of PROCFish was designed to enhance management of reef fisheries in the Pacific Islands by providing Pacific Island governments and communities with accurate, unbiased scientific information about the status and prospects of reef fisheries. Seventeen countries and territories were targetted by the project.
Most results and outputs of the project are accessible on the PROCFish webpages.
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 has produced a software to enter and process data from underwater visual censuses, which can be downloaded from the Web (see ReACT web pages). This is the first in a series of utility software. This product is already being designed. One person worked specifically on this project: Franck Magron, Reef Fisheries Information Manager.
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 was in charge of this project.
DemEcoFish
Role of Demography and Ecology in the Fisheries of Coastal Resources in Pacific Islands
This two year-long project, finished in October 2003. It was 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 included a phase for turning over this information, particularly in the form of indicators, to local communities for management purposes. Two people worked specifically on this project, i.e. a student researcher on detachment, Eric Clua, 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 began officially in January 2002. 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 have been added the other countries involved in the PROCFISH Project for the second phase of promoting widespread use of the survey methods.
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