Dr Roland Pitcher

Dr C. Roland Pitcher provides a science foundation supporting management for sustainability of the seabed environment. He has more than 35 years experience in marine ecology and fisheries research, covering coral reef fishes, tropical rock lobster, effects of trawling, recovery & dynamics, biodiversity mapping & prediction, modelling & assessment, and management evaluation.

Current activities

Dr Roland Pitcher is a marine ecologist with CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere. He has diverse interests in seabed ecology including dynamics of habitat-forming biota, drivers of distribution & abundance, the effects of human uses and management.

Dr Pitcher leads research to improve understanding of regional seabed ecosystems and provide information that supports improved planning of ocean uses, more detailed quantitative ecological risk assessments (ERAs) of the environmental sustainability of human activities and evaluations of the efficacy of management measures. His research addresses issues such as:
• Characterising & mapping of large marine regions, including designing & implementing new marine biodiversity surveys, but often re-using available historical survey data.
• Planning for management of multiple uses of the marine environment, to ensure appropriate & sustainable use of different habitat types; and comprehensive, adequate & representative design of marine reserves.
• Understanding the effects of trawling and other activities that interact with the seabed; and the environmental benefits & trade-offs of fisheries management and spatial management in seabed ecosystems.
• Understanding the effects & impacts of climate variability & events on seabed ecosystems.
• Application of data from technologies such as underwater instrumentation, airborne & satellite remote sensing, oceanographic datasets and model outputs to provide new macro-ecological insights for better scientific understanding and management.

Dr Pitcher works across a portfolio of projects, including:
• FRDC Project 2016-039: potential environmental risk of Australia's trawl fisheries at landscape scales — predict and map national seabed assemblages and assess their exposure to trawling and inclusion in closures and reserves, and identify priorities for future habitat ERAs.
• CSIRO Research Plus PDF Project: risk assessment of trawling on seabed fauna in Australian and international waters — predict and map distributions of benthic invertebrate communities at regional scales, and assess trawl impacts and sustainability status.
• Trawling Best Practices Project: finding common ground on the scientific knowledge regarding trawling best practices — contribute to a global synthesis by developing an innovative new quantitative method for trawl risk assessment, and implementing internationally.
• Marine National Facility RV Investigator Voyage: Long-term recovery of trawled seabed communities, particularly habitat-forming benthos, 30 years after the cessation of Taiwanese pair-trawling on the north west shelf of Australia.
• WAMSI Project 1.1.1 Distribution, species and environmental drivers of benthic biodiversity in the Kimberley region — quantify importance of environmental drivers and predict regional biodiversity distributions.

Dr Pitcher also provides advice to fisheries managers and marine environment managers, and is a scientific member on advisory committees.

Background

Dr Pitcher joined CSIRO in 1988, researching tropical rock lobster in Torres Strait — the most important commercial fishery for local indigenous people and subject to an international treaty with PNG. He quickly developed & led a broad range of research including commercial & traditional fisheries, seabed habitat mapping, effects of trawling on the seabed, GIS & remote sensing, marine conservation planning, dynamics of seabed megabenthos, among others. His work has also included early development of a number of innovative technological solutions for obtaining quantitative data remotely without extractive sampling, such as towed-video, remotely operated vehicle (ROV), and acoustics — complete with precise positioning & underwater tracking, and advanced data recording. He has managed research projects and supervised staff ranging from single-project teams to very large multi-agency multi-disciplinary programs and international projects.

Achievements

Dr Pitcher initiated & implemented Australia’s first & longest running fishery independent stock survey, for Torres Strait lobster. He developed assessment models that supported managers to achieve and maintain sustainable catches. The 25-yr survey legacy continues to underpin research and management of the tropical rock lobster fishery today.

He designed and implemented a series of large experiments to quantify the effects of trawling on the seabed in the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) Marine Park. The multi-facetted approach involved manipulative experiments on a scale not attempted elsewhere, and contributed to significant changes in the management of the Queensland trawl fishery and the Marine Park. He identified the need for an integrated package of research — beyond impact studies — to understand the management implications of trawling at whole-of-region scale, including: seabed recovery dynamics, mapping distributions of affected habitats & biota, multi-scale spatial patterns & intensity of trawling effort, and simulation modelling of effort, impact, recovery, distributions and management. He developed multiple long-term/large-scale projects, including the GBR Seabed Biodiversity Project, to implement this vision, which successfully integrated 15 years of research to scale up experimental results, quantify impacts of trawling at regional scale & evaluate the efficacy of management. These novel assessments demonstrated that a suite of management interventions had improved the sustainability of all habitats & species analysed — providing critical feed-back to managers and identifying the interventions that best ameliorated impacts.

Dr Pitcher identified that biodiversity distributions were a critically important key to assessing effects of trawling, and demonstrated a suite of environmental variables as surrogates for biota in an early substantive application of biophysical prediction mapping at significant scale in the marine realm. His team’s innovative biophysical modelling confirmed the utility of environmental surrogates for predicting species distributions, and he subsequently led the Prediction Program in the CERF Marine Biodiversity Hub to further develop this capability — including statistical methods & collation of environmental predictor datasets — for Australia-wide and international applications. He initiated & led development of the first national maps of seabed biodiversity that, among others, underpinned design of the Commonwealth Marine Reserve System.

His integrated research on effects of trawling and seabed mapping is recognised internationally. The Census of Marine Life (CoML) identified the GBR Seabed Project as a globally important marine biodiversity contribution. Dr Pitcher co-developed & co-led a CoML cross-program synthesis project on a multi-regional analysis of surrogacy relationships between species distributions & their environment. For this project, he conceived a novel method for linking disparate data on biodiversity composition changes along environmental gradients, which was developed collaboratively into R package gradientForest. This method is now an important capability used to predict & map marine & terrestrial biodiversity in Australia & internationally.

Dr Pitcher is applying these capabilities to current research that provides a science foundation in support of management for environmental sustainability of human uses of seabed ecosystems, particularly trawl fishing . He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed papers, 30 other articles and 70 reports for CSIRO clients, and supervised & supported several postdocs and postgrad students.

Other related links

• Marine Resources & Industries
• Coastal Development & Management
• State of the Environment Report — Footprint of Trawling
• Predicting biodiversity status to support management in southeast Australia
• Implications of current spatial management for Commonwealth trawl fisheries
• Quantitative sustainability indicators for ecological risk assessment of a trawl fishery