South Island Inshore Finfish Fisheries

These reports provide a characterisation of South Island (FMAs 3 & 5) inshore finfish fisheries for the 1999/2000 to 2009/2010 fishing years. The work was carried out by Adam Langley (Trophia Ltd) and jointly funded by the Challenger and SouthEast Finfish Management Companies.

The fisheries characterisations are based on an analysis of the catch, effort and landings data reported to the Ministry of Fisheries on the statutory reporting forms. These data are used to define the fisheries in each of the four FMAs and describe trends in these fisheries over the last decade.

For each FMA, the document identifies the key inshore fisheries defined by location, fishing method, target species and catch composition. Information is also provided regarding the composition of the fishing fleet and the port of landing. For each fishery, recent trends in fishing effort and the catch and catch rate of the main species are also presented.

This report represents an update of the previous analysis to include the 2009/10 fishing year. Some minor improvements to the analytical approach were implemented in the second iteration although the fundamental fishery definitions were equivalent to the previous analysis.