Assessing tropical marine invertebrates:
A manual for Pacific Island resource managers

by Kalo Pakoa, Kim Friedman, Bradley Moore, Emmanuel Tardy and Ian Bertram

This manual is designed for fisheries and environmental officers, and non-governmental partners who are tasked with assessing the state of fisheries resources and macroinvertebrate communities. Promoting the use of the standardised survey methodologies and analytical procedures presented in this manual allows survey results to be compared across different countries and/or regions, and ensures a broader geographical perspective on invertebrate resources.

This manual adopts a simplistic approach by beginning with a clear management question, followed by a discussion of survey design and selection of fisheries-independent survey methodologies to use, and the basic analytical techniques for indicating stock health. This manual does not make suggestions on ‘how to manage’, but focuses on how to attain a useful and repeatable measure of resource stock condition for the sustainable management of invertebrate resources.

The three main uses of this manual are:
1. Estimating the status of stocks of certain fishery resources in order to provide management advice.
2. Assessing the impact of development activities or a natural disaster (commonly referred to as an environmental impact assessment, or EIA).
3. Long-term monitoring to detect changes due to development, human habitation or environmental changes such as climate change.

	Download the complete English version: Assessing tropical marine Invertebrates: A manual for Pacific Island resource managers	(pdf: 14 MB)