Zoning and ‘rights to access’ have been a feature of fisheries since the earliest recorded civilizations. More recently, fisheries managers have used spatial management to various degrees, and virtually all management plans implicitly use some form of spatial management for a variety of purposes. Until recently the focus has been on target species and maximizing yields. However, there has been increasing community concern about the wider ecological impacts of fishing resulting in moves to ecosystem based fisheries management. Explicit spatial management (including closures) has also become a key requirement for a number of Australian fisheries arising from strategic assessments under the EPBC Act. There has also been an increasing focus of fisheries management at finer spatial scales. In addition, in response to a perceived failure of traditional fisheries management, there have been frequent calls for widespread use of MPAs (primarily no-take zones) as fisheries management tools. Management of other marine uses, which can impinge on fisheries, similarly use spatially-based governance and management arrangements. So how effective are these policy directions likely to be in achieving the objectives of fishery management?

There has been a relatively rapid development in tools to support these policy drivers: VMS, electronic tags, UVS, ecological risk assessments and spatially explicit resource and ecosystem models are some examples. Not withstanding this, the policy development still runs ahead of the scientific tools and methods to support it. The potential for fishery closures to protect upper slope gulper sharks is discussed as an example of the use of spatial management to mitigate the effects of fishing, highlighting current gaps in understanding and future research needs. More generally, the results of a recently completed ‘whole of fishery’ MSE study demonstrate the importance of considering spatial management as one of an integrated set of management ‘levers’ for successful fisheries rather than as a ‘panacea’ to solve all fishery management issues.