Guidelines for making breakwaters "fish friendly” released

Making breakwaters more user-friendly for the community and wildlife. That’s the aim of new guidelines just released by DPI Fisheries, that will influence future maintenance and upgrades to the most well-used breakwater structures up and down the NSW coast.

NSW DPI Fisheries Senior Manager Patrick Dwyer said as breakwater structures (such as river entrance breakwalls and harbour training walls) are such well-visited features of our NSW coast, managing them for all their many users was important.

“As well as keeping river mouths open, creating harbours, marinas and safe ports, protecting some foreshores from erosion, breakwaters can be great places to walk, fish and enjoy our marine estate,” Mr Dwyer said.

Ideas to improve breakwaters outlined in the guidelines vary from adding walking paths and fishing platforms to existing breakwaters, to incorporating wildlife habitat (such as seal haul out areas) into their design.

The guidelines were developed on the back of an extensive audit by DPI Fisheries that reviewed each of the 134 breakwater structures on the NSW coast and assessed them in terms of their environmental values and the needs of the community using them.

“We know breakwater structures have completely changed river mouths, sometimes in a negative way. The audit was developed to see how we can make the best of those structures for all users, and the environment,” Mr Dwyer said.

“We hope these guidelines will help make best practice for breakwater structures become standard practice,” he said.

The Fish Friendly Breakwater Guidelines were developed in consultation with marine estate agency partners, Australia’s foremost marine infrastructure experts and managers of breakwaters in NSW over two years.

It is an evidence-based approach to improving our NSW marine estate funded by the NSW Marine Estate Management Strategy.

You can check out the guidelines and supporting information including the audit by visiting the project profile page on the MEMS website.