The farming of salmonids is Australia’s most valuable seafood sector, worth over $1.2b to the economy. Environmental sustainability remains a central pillar to the industries ongoing success and its acceptability in the wider community. In recent years the industry has increased its production in more exposed coastal environments where the potential interaction with other sectors has raised concerns. Demonstrating that further development is done in a responsible and sustainable manner means that understanding how farming in new areas might change environmental interactions is well understood and managed to acceptable levels. An environmental monitoring program that can meet the needs of assessing environmental performance of the development will provide this understanding, allowing for appropriate regulatory responses.
Storm Bay in southeast Tasmania has been identified as a priority area for expansion. Here we will discuss the learnings and challenges of designing, implementing, and evaluating an environmental monitoring program that encompassed a range of receiving habitats after four years of data collection. Central to this was an assessment of the ecological and statistical sensitivity of the design to detect and attribute change in a system with multiple farming operations and a range of other sources of variability, both natural and anthropogenic.