Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries (STECF) - DCF – Assessment of NP Changes (STECF-13-02)

The Expert Working Group meeting of the Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries EWG 12-20 was held from 10th – 14th December 2012 in Brussels, Belgium to evaluate the MS proposed amendments to the 2011-2013 National Programmes (NP) for the year 2013 submitted under the Data Collection Framework. The EWG report was reviewed by written procedure by the STECF in early February 2013.JRC.G.4-Maritime affair

P491-BioMod Deliverable 4912 Linkage of Economic and Fisheries Indicators

Developing and parameterising fisheries bioeconomic models is seen as playing an important role in the evaluation of proposed fisheries management strategies. One of the key challenges in doing this has been the different aggregation levels of the biological and economic data. For example, economic data (costs, prices etc) is aggregated at the supra-region level as a function of fleet components, whereas biological data is collected at the smaller regional level. Management plan evaluations are required at the regional level which means methods must be developed to scale and merge the economic and biological data at this level. Here we present a method based on the use of transversal variables (such as effort). By calculating a ‘unit cost per effort’ at the supraregion level, we are able to estimate costs at the regional level. This is made more difficult by the aggregation of fishing metiers and gears in the economic data, which have their own cost structure. Linear modelling techniques are used to help overcome to this issue. This report presents these methods using the North Sea fisheries as a case study. Note that this report was not prepared using MS Word. It was prepared using Latex / KnitR and R. This allows the computer code that was used to generate the results to be embedded in the report and executed during the report compilation, including the plotting of figures. This is preferable for scientific report writing as it ensures that the results presented here are ‘live’. Consequently, the following report may not strictly adhere to the JRC template.JRC.G.3-Maritime affair

Report on the Workshop on Transversal Variables. (Linking economic and biological effort data (call) design). 19th -23rd January 2015

The Workshop on the Transversal Variables took place in Zagreb from the 19th to 23rd of January, 2015 mainly to tackle the issues related to the increasing need of having fisheries fleet economic data and fisheries biologic data on a level of disaggregation that would allow a proper interoperability between datasets to underpin bioeconomic modelling. For that, several analyses were carried out and conclusions taken. These analyses were : 1. comparison of economic and biological effort data calls both with respect to their level of resolution and the landings and effort values obtained from equivalent aggregations was performed. This was compared to what would be needed in order to undertake bioeconomic modelling for a chosen management plan. 2. The description of how MS are calculating effort variables and a proposal on the way forward to harmonize approaches, 3. Conclusions on how to harmonize levels of resolution, the variable definitions and the codification in use amongst data calls, in order to make them comparable and based on coherent standard codifications.JRC.G.3-Maritime affair

FISHERIES DATA COLLECTION FRAMEWORK - The DCF Reporting and Implementation Cycles and the Data End-user Feedback

Every year the Member States Data Collection (DCF) Annual Reports and Data Transmission to the data end-user are evaluated by the STECF regarding the (a) the execution of the national programs approved by the Commission; and (b) the quality of the data collected by the Member States. For that, aside of the Annual reports on the activities developed by each MS, also the data end-user should provide feedback on the data received, and in specific identify the problems these data might have. This is a process that imports to be seen and used as positive input to streamline the collection and transmission of data and to foster incrementally higher quality standards to the EU MS data. For such to happen, it is also of importance that the feedback received from the end-user to be of enough detail to allow a proper assessment and the identification of the linkage between the data gap and the reason for such gap on the source. In this report the conclusion from STECF EWG 1510 on the ways to improve the annual end-user feedback are further explored and detailed with the aim of supporting future exercises and in specific to aid on the dialogue between the Commission and the DCF data end-users on this regard.JRC.G.3-Maritime affair

R quality checks for DCF data submission: Exploratory Data Analysis for Fishing Fleet economic data call.

The JRC-IPSC under it Administrative Arrangement with DG MARE, amongst many other activities, has to call data from the Member States, give support to MS on the continuos improvement of data quality, make this data available to the Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries (STECF) and then curate these data to ensure it long-term usability. Amongst the calls launched by JRC-IPSC, the call for fishing fleet economic data is launched every year since 2005. Since then a policy on data quality has been implemented, however, lately, due to the existence of more data intensive processes and a progressively implementation of an open data policy and a data reusability policy, additional effort has been done to further streamline the process of assessing/improving the data quality. In this sequence, since 2013 a new tool was developed in support of the data quality assessment. This is a tool based on the generation of dynamic reports based in knitr/Sweave (R packages). This report presentes the Data Quality Report . A tool developed in R /Latex language that on the fly fetchs data from a database where data is uploaded by the MS, cleans the data, reprocess the data, produce the outputs to support the data quality analysis and, at the end, generates a pdf report where the coding, outputs and analysis are putted together. This tool has revealed to be of major efficiency - less time consuming, error free, reproducible at any time and based on a policy of transparence (code and outputs all made available together). Therefore the same methodology will be used on support of the data policy in the JRC-IPSC in the future. For that further enhancements might be sought such has the conversion of the outputs from a pdf document to an interactive web application.JRC.G.3-Maritime affair

Collection and dissemination of fisheries data in support of the EU Common Fisheries Policy

ABSTRACT: A systematic European Union (EU)-wide data framework for the collection of fisheries data in support of the EU Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) was first implemented in 2002. Since that time, EU data collection regulation has undergone 2 revisions in response to evolving policy needs. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) is responsible for conducting research and providing advice on fisheries management under the CFP, and since 2005 has worked closely with the Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries (STECF). JRC and STECF have an open data policy, and aggregated data submitted by EU member states in response to data calls issued under the provisions of the data collection regulation are published via the website of the STECF. This paper provides an overview of the fisheries data activities carried out by the JRC in support of and in collaboration with the STECF and discusses some of the benefits and drawbacks of such activities.JRC.D.2-Water and Marine Resource