SPECIAL SESSIONS

Our waters are increasingly crowded, volatile and changing. Fisheries stock assessments and harvest strategies, as well as species population assessments, face mounting pressure from multiple directions. Competing uses and integrated management require fisheries and aquatic science to be accountable across multiple user groups, ecosystem objectives, and broader economic and social dimensions. Acute shocks (such as flooding, cyclones, harmful algal blooms), and the long-term trajectory of climate change add further complexity. We invite presentations exploring how stock assessment and harvest strategies are adapting and responding to these broader pressures.

This session explores how science can support the management of marine and freshwater ecosystems under an increasingly dry and variable climate. Bringing together researchers, managers, and policy agencies including the Murray–Darling Basin Authority, it will examine climate-driven trends, extreme events, and implications for ecosystem health and waterway management.

Discussion will highlight emerging science and collaborative approaches to improving adaptation, resilience, and decision-making with limited water resources. The session also aims to strengthen cross-sector connections, identify shared research priorities and explore how aquatic science can respond to the challenges of a drier future.

This session explores the critical early life stages that shape population persistence and recruitment across aquatic systems. Contributions will examine the mechanisms governing germination, egg and larval survival, and how physiology, behaviour, and transport processes interact to influence recruitment success and variability. The session welcomes studies spanning freshwater, estuarine, and marine environments, with a focus on understanding how early developmental bottlenecks influence population dynamics under changing environmental conditions.

The oceans around Australia are changing fast. In southeast and southwest Australia ocean temperatures are warming more than the global average, making the making them some of the world’s most prominent marine climate hotspots. This is driving profound shifts in marine ecosystems, including species distributions, trophic structure, size spectra, and overall community composition. Ecosystem surveys and time series observations provide unprecedented insight into how warming, marine heatwaves, and changing oceanography can re-shape pelagic and demersal communities, and ecosystem functioning. This session welcomes researchers around Australia, working across physical oceanography, ecology, fisheries science, and long-term monitoring to explore emerging patterns, mechanisms, and management implications of ecosystem change in the waters of Australia.

Session Themes

• The physical drivers of rapid warming

• Long term ecosystem survey results: abundance, size structure, trophic shifts

• Changes in fisheries species: winners, losers, and emerging assemblages

• Community level responses to warming oceans

• Implications for fisheries management, conservation, and ecosystem resilience

Emerging contaminants are increasingly recognised as major threats to aquatic ecosystems and biodiversity. This session focuses on contaminants including PFAS, nano- and microplastics, pharmaceuticals, herbicides, pesticides, and other novel pollutants affecting freshwater and marine systems. Contributions may address contaminant pathways, ecological and physiological impacts, monitoring approaches, risk assessment, and management responses aimed at improving ecosystem and species health.

This session will focus on understanding the behaviour and welfare of fish in natural habitats and aquaculture settings, as well as during fishery capture, holding and release. As behaviour is increasingly used as a key indicator of fish welfare, and this session will cover this topic, as well as stress responses, recovery, survival, environmental enrichment, humane slaughter and the ethical considerations of fish welfare. Presentations will highlight the latest research on factors influencing fish welfare and behaviour , including husbandry, capture, holding and handling practices. By bringing together experts in fish behaviour and welfare science, this session aims to promote improved management strategies that enhance fish welfare, reduce stress and mortality, and support sustainable practices in fisheries and aquaculture..

This session explores the social, cultural, and ecological dimensions of inland and coastal fisheries undergoing environmental and societal change. Bringing together Indigenous-led perspectives, fisheries science, and social–ecological research, the session will examine food security, equity, governance, and cultural values across freshwater and marine systems. Contributions highlighting Indigenous science, knowledge systems, and collaborative approaches to fisheries management are particularly encouraged.

Rapid advances in technology are transforming the way aquatic ecosystems are monitored and managed. This session focuses on emerging monitoring tools operating across rivers, estuaries, and oceans, including environmental DNA, acoustics, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, remote sensing, and big-data approaches. Contributions are encouraged that demonstrate how these technologies improve ecological understanding, predictive capacity, and management outcomes across freshwater and marine systems.

This session explores how genetic methods and fisheries modelling approaches advance our understanding of marine populations. It considers how these techniques can be applied independently or in combination within population assessment and fisheries science. The session highlights how both genetic and non-genetic approaches provide complementary insights that support more robust assessments, improved abundance estimates, and stronger fisheries management outcomes

Calcified structures such as otoliths, shells, coral skeletons, vertebrate and other biomineralized tissues provide high-resolution, lifetime records of environmental conditions experienced by aquatic organisms. As global change accelerates, these natural archives are increasingly valuable for reconstructing past habitats, detecting physiological stress, and understanding species responses to rapid environmental variability and extreme events. 

This special session will bring together researchers using cutting-edge analytical techniques and interdisciplinary approaches to explore how calcified structures can reveal organism–environment interactions across marine and freshwater systems. We aim to highlight advances in sclerochronology, geochemical tracers, and imaging technologies, alongside applications spanning ecology, fisheries science, conservation, and climate change biology. 

Key Themes

Reconstructing environmental histories: Use of stable isotopes and trace elements to infer temperature, salinity, and habitat use.

Tracking movement and connectivity: Insights into migration pathways and habitat shifts across spatial gradients.

Responses to extreme events: Detecting signatures of marine heatwaves, floods, hypoxia, and pollution events in growth structures.

Impacts of climate change: Ocean warming, acidification, and altered hydrology effects on calcification and organismal performance.

Methodological advances: Innovations in microchemistry (e.g., LA-ICP-MS), imaging, and data analytics.

Cross-taxa perspectives: Comparative studies across fishes, molluscs, corals, and crustaceans.

Long-term monitoring programs provide incredibly valuable data vital to informed decision making and understanding of change in living aquatic systems. Despite this, monitoring programs are increasingly under stress to justify their continuation, often due to financial pressures. This is paradoxical given growing climatic extremes, ecological change, and competing demands on shared waters. This special theme seeks to explore why we need long term monitoring and how long-term fauna monitoring can be used to best support management frameworks and decisions that support coexistence between species, people, and Country, and how we can leverage existing programs for maximum impact in the future.

This session brings together researchers, practitioners, managers, and decision makers focused on managing freshwater fish in regulated river systems. It examines how flow regimes, infrastructure, and hydrological connectivity shape fish movement, ecology, and population resilience, with a focus on informing practical management and design outcomes.

Through applied case studies, the program highlights science-based approaches to improving fish outcomes, including fish passage, environmental flows, and connectivity at barriers from road crossings to major dams. Emphasis is placed on real-world implementation, including design criteria, performance, trade-offs, and operational constraints.

The session aims to foster collaboration across science, engineering, management, and policy to deliver practical, integrated solutions for healthier fish populations in regulated and climate-impacted rivers.

Aquatic organisms play fundamental roles in regulating nutrient, carbon, and sediment cycling across ecosystems. This session explores how species traits, metabolism, and biological interactions influence biogeochemical processes from individual to ecosystem scales. Contributions may address links between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, scaling metabolic processes to whole-system fluxes, and the relative importance of species identity versus functional traits in shaping aquatic ecosystem processes.

Australia is heading toward a potentially challenging 2026/27 summer, with a possible El Niño and an elevated likelihood of extreme events across marine and freshwater systems. Marine heatwaves, coral bleaching, fishery disruptions, harmful algal blooms, low flow freshwater conditions, and cascading ecological impacts are all plausible scenarios. These events demand actionable response plans, cross agency coordination, and scenario based preparation well ahead of the season. This session (it will be in late November!) brings together scientists, managers, and practitioners from freshwater and marine realms to learn what they have implemented or planned for a summer of extremes. We welcome papers on topics such as:

• Climate outlooks for 2026/27 and implications of a (potential) El Niño

• Heatwave risks: ecological, fisheries, aquaculture and conservation impacts

• Freshwater and estuarine vulnerabilities under extreme heat and low flow conditions

• Agency response planning: what’s in place, what’s planned?

• Scenario development for extreme event preparedness

• Building actionable, cross sector response plans for rapid action

Australia has a long history of fisheries enhancement, ranging from the early release of salmonids, to the recent deployments of large offshore artificial reefs. Currently, there is much activity in Australia, with multiple jurisdictions investing in stocking, reef infrastructure, and habitat restoration to rebuild depleted stocks, improve the health of fish populations, or enhance fishing opportunities more broadly. This session will review these diverse programs across aquaculture- and habitat-aided enhancement efforts, and provide an opportunity to synthesise the various plans, approaches, experiences, and knowledge, and identify future directions and challenges. Topics may include freshwater and marine stocking programs, hatchery practices underpinning releases, installation of artificial habitats in rivers, estuaries, and coastal environments, habitat restoration (e.g., oyster reefs, seagrass restoration), and also other fish aggregating devices (FADs). We particularly encourage contributions from researchers and practitioners developing or implementing new enhancement initiatives, offering insights into emerging projects, innovations, and future challenges.

This session explores innovative approaches to conserving and restoring aquatic biodiversity across freshwater and marine environments, recognising that effective conservation requires both ecological intervention and strong community partnerships. Bringing together researchers, practitioners, managers, Traditional Owners, and community stakeholders, the session will examine how conservation programs can better protect threatened species, restore habitats, and improve long-term ecosystem resilience.

Topics will extend beyond traditional restoration approaches such as snags and logs to include broader ecosystem-based interventions addressing altered flow regimes, eutrophication, habitat degradation, and climate impacts. Contributions may include habitat restoration, species recovery programs, environmental management, remote sensing and monitoring technologies, and approaches delivering benefits across multiple species and ecosystems.

The session will also highlight the critical role of stakeholder engagement, citizen science, Indigenous knowledge, and community-led conservation initiatives in achieving meaningful and enduring biodiversity outcomes. Through case studies, applied research, and practical examples, the session aims to share lessons, strengthen collaboration, and explore how science, management, and communities can work together to support healthier aquatic ecosystems and threatened species recovery.

The proposed joint session, Scaling from Sites to Systems: Achieving Basin-Scale Ecological Outcomes, tackles one of the central challenges in Murray-Darling Basin management: translating high-quality local restoration efforts into measurable, cumulative ecological improvements across the basin. While many projects have delivered clear benefits at individual sites, demonstrating how these efforts collectively contribute to recovery of fish, waterbirds and floodplain vegetation at landscape scales remains difficult.

Within the context of the Basin Plan, often at the center of both scientific and political debate, this session will explore how (and if) we can move from site-based interventions to credible, system-wide ecological outcomes. As scrutiny increases on the effectiveness and value of environmental investments, there is growing call for frameworks, monitoring approaches and analytical tools that can link local actions to basin-scale ecological responses.

This session will bring together expertise from fisheries science, ornithology and floodplain ecology to examine where current approaches are succeeding, where they are falling short, and what is required to bridge the gap between local management and basin-wide recovery - or indeed, if this is even possible. By fostering an honest and interdisciplinary discussion, the session aims to strengthen the scientific foundation for environmental decision-making and improve our ability to articulate, and ultimately achieve, meaningful ecological outcomes across the Murray-Darling Basin.

Our freshwater ecosystems are under threat. The climate is changing and human demands on these systems continue to grow. Future ecological objectives and targets will need to reflect the intersecting needs of functioning ecosystems, First Nations values, and the desires of the community, within a changing climate.

For example, the Murray-Darling Basin is of significant environmental, cultural and economic value to Australia. The challenge will be to balance competing pressures in what is likely to be a hotter and drier climate in the Basin.

This special session aims to explore the latest ecological research, alternative approaches, and new ways of working with First Nations and communities, that could be applied to the setting and evaluation of clear and realistic objectives and targets to protect and improve the resilience of freshwater ecosystems.

Sharks, rays, and chimaeras (Chondrichthyes) are integral components of aquatic ecosystems, occupying diverse habitats across rivers, estuaries, and oceans. As human uses of these systems expand, these species increasingly share space with people, fisheries, and changing environmental conditions. Aligned with the conference theme “Life in Water: Sharing Spaces in Dynamic Systems,” this session explores how chondrichthyans persist, interact, and are managed within these shared and evolving aquatic environments. We invite contributions across a broad range of disciplines, including movement ecology, habitat use, and population dynamics; conservation genomics and biodiversity assessment; fisheries interactions, bycatch, and post-release survival; and recovery planning for threatened species. We strongly encourage work that engages with human dimensions, including coexistence, cultural perspectives, risk perception, and the governance of shared aquatic resources. By bringing together diverse knowledge systems and approaches, this session aims to highlight how understanding chondrichthyan ecology and their interactions with human activities can support adaptive management and long-term monitoring in dynamic systems. Ultimately, the session will contribute to building more resilient, inclusive, and sustainable futures for both chondrichthyans and the communities that share their waters.

What is big-picture thinking? Does it require meta-analysis of collated datasets at large scales, or is there still a place for detailed, mechanistic studies at fine-scales? Big-picture thinking is possible at any scale, and by grounding rigorous small-scale studies within big-picture frameworks, insights from centimeter-to-meter scales can inform general theory and shape management and policy outcomes across catchments.

The session will showcase studies that develop and test big ideas using research at small spatial scales. From fine-scale behaviours that shape regional distributions of populations, to species interactions that drive bottom-up control in foodwebs, what are the local processes that drive regional outcomes?

Contributions are welcome from studies of any environment, species, or methodological approach. By de-emphasising such details, we highlight the generality of research that connects small-scale processes to large scale patterns, proposes testable frameworks to scale up local findings to inform big-picture thinking, or uses detailed local studies to develop and test general theory in freshwater systems.

Freshwater and marine ecosystems provide powerful opportunities for comparative ecological research. This session explores how comparisons across salinity boundaries can be used to test ecological theory, identify universal processes, and understand system-specific constraints. Contributions are invited that examine generalities and exceptions across aquatic environments, using comparative approaches to strengthen ecological understanding and predictive capacity.