There were several participants in the 2-day workshop held in Nadi on 28th and 29th April such as Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu, met with experts from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Secretariat for the Pacific Community, (SPC), the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA), the South Pacific Geosciences Commission (SOPAC), The New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmosphere (NIWA) and the Global Census of Marine Life on Seamounts (CenSeam) to discuss the results of research conducted under the Oceanic Fisheries Management Project, and other regional initiatives.
Kelvin Passfield, from (IUCN) Oceania Regional Office based in Suva, has organized the workshop. He told that seamounts in the deep Pacific Ocean are extremely important for the long line fishing which provides economic wealth to the Pacific Islands region. he added that this workshop is vital as it provided the first opportunity to discuss the results of a questionnaire survey of longline fishermen about their fishing activities around seamounts, which had been conducted in 2009.
The workshop also provided an opportunity to compare results from this survey with detailed scientific analysis of fishermen’s logbook records which was undertaken in the same year by Secretariat for the Pacific Community (SPC), as well as hear of the database of seamount locations that has been prepared by SPC. Though the participants all agreed they had learned a great deal from the workshop they also agreed that despite the obvious importance of seamounts to fisheries in the Pacific, there is very little known about them, and they saw this workshop as a step in the right direction to remedy this situation.
