Fisheries

One of the most challenging scientific underwater experiments ever attempted by NIWA is taking place this month on the Chatham Rise.

NIWA is in its third year of a 5-year phased project on the deepwater line fishery in Tonga funded by the NZ Aid Programme’s Partnership for International Development Fund. The aim of the project is to deliver the improved governance, management, and economic and biological sustainability of the fishery focusing on deepwater snapper and bluenose in the Tonga EEZ.

15 March 2018
Think about a futuristic world where at night time, people use different kind of self-propelled vehicles to hover across cities, illuminating the skies with different colours and shapes, while transiting around them.

When NIWA fisheries scientist Richard O’Driscoll went to sea earlier this year, he and his team measured so many fish that laid end to end, they would have stretched for 31km.

At a laboratory just outside Whangarei, scientists are putting very young snapper through comprehensive physical testing - including a full medical check-up involving smell, hearing, vision, and even anxiety testing.

NIWA research ship Tangaroa has been chartered by the Ministry of Primary Industries to survey the Hoki fishery on the Chatham Rise during January and early February 2018.

“You almost become a fishing psychologist – you can tell by the way people walk up the ramp to get their trailer if they’ve had a good day.”

Rapid warming of the ocean near Tasmania may provide a good indication of how the water around New Zealand will change as the planet warms, say NIWA scientists.

Unlike other ecosystem models, machine learning is built solely from the information it is presented.

Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) is trophodynamic modelling software that uses a mass-balance approach to describe ecosystem based, marine food web interactions.

Spatially explicit disturbance/recovery models are a cellular automaton that uses a mechanistic approach to investigate recovery rates of benthic species following disturbance events.

Resource trade-off models are spatial models that use biological, environmental and socio-economic data to optimise management (protected area designation) across potentially conflicting uses, or across different ecosystem services.