Fish species sensitivity to fishing

Data on fish species sensitivity to fishing combining vulnerability from Cheung et al 2007 supplementary material and on precautionary fishing mortality in European waters from Rindorf et al 2020. Following STECF (2022), low sensitivity species are defined as species with a precautionary fishing mortality greater than 3 for the Rindorf et al data or with a vulnerability less than 40 for the Cheung data. Species with a high sensitivity are defined as species with a precautionary fishing mortality less than 0.41 for the Rindorf et al data or with a vulnerability greater than 70 for the Cheung data. Remaining species are defined as medium sensitivity.  Reference for the data and definitions: Cheung, W. W., Watson, R., Morato, T., Pitcher, T. J., & Pauly, D. (2007). Intrinsic vulnerability in the global fish catch. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 333, 1-12.  Rindorf, A., Gislason, H., Burns, F., Ellis, J. R., & Reid, D. (2020). Are fish sensitive to trawling recovering in the Northeast Atlantic?. Journal of Applied Ecology, 57(10), 1936-1947.  STECF (2022). Validation of selected sustainability indicators and underlying methodologies for the revision of the EU marketing standards for fisheries products (STECF-22-12)</p

SEAwise Report on communications strategy and activities, March 2022

This report is part of the SEAwise project and summarises the key activities under WP1: Knowledge Exchange and Integration, Task 1.4, Communications and Outreach, from the period October 2022 – March 2023. The critical activities undertaken during this period include the creation of a project website, drafting of project communications and social media strategies, and support to establish a synthesised base of communications across the project. Outputs from these activities are attached to this report in the Annexes. More information can be found at https://seawiseproject.org/</p

SEAwise Report on requirements for transparency and quality control

This report describes the common protocol for producing openly-available, quality assuring data and methods used in SEAwise. SEAwise data and methods are all data collected, processed, used or stored in connection with the SEAwise project. Making quality assured data openly available is a key priority in SEAwise in accordance with the FAIR principles: Ensuring that data are findable, openly accessible, interoperable and available for increased re-use. The processes in place to ensure this are described in this report.  This report shows the results of the SEAwise project. More information on the project can be found at https://seawiseproject.org/</p

Synthesis of ProByFish modelling approach and the effect of TACs for target species on bycatch species

   The ProByFish study was initiated to assist in the development of methods to evaluate the impact of different fisheries management options on the objectives of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). The study developed robust methods to a) define target and bycatch species and b) to divide the bycatch species into valuable and collateral bycatch species, the first generally retained on board and landed and the latter generally discarded. The classification of a species depended on the fleet and area in which the fleet operates. The study also identified species which can only sustain low levers of fishing and proceeded to include examples of these in mixed fisheries models.  This report describes the work under the study to analyse of effect of TACs for target species on fishing mortalities of hybrid, valued and collateral bycatch species assuming different management strategies to define TACs for the target species, while no management applies on the bycatch species. The analyses were conducted in a mixed fisheries Management Strategy Evaluation (MSE) framework to examine the probability that single stock TACs are sufficient under natural variability, mixed fishery dynamics and management strategies. The result shows that the effect of changing the species on which to define a TAC are minor compared to the effects concerning the uncertainty around the implementation of the landing obligation.</p

SEAwise review of health impact of different fish and fish sizes

The SEAwise project works to deliver a fully operational tool that will allow fishers, managers, and policy makers to easily apply Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management (EBFM) in their fisheries. This SEAwise report evaluates the health impacts of different fish species. The consumption of different types of fish is part of a healthy diet, where the health impact depends on the nutrient content of fish as well as possible contaminants. Information on these aspects were collected from institutional and governmental sources and quality assured. National nutritional databases were consulted to obtain regional data to respond to the case studies approach of the SEAWISE project. When data was not available from national databases, a literature review was conducted to attain complementary data. As the raw data from different sources was in various formats and structures, the data was subsequently adapted to ensure unit equivalence and homogeneous descriptions to allow combination and analyses of all the information.The health impacts of nutrients and contaminants content in fishes depends on the person’s requirements. Certain population groups can have increased nutritional needs, e.g. pregnant or elderly people, and citizens of certain countries can present specific nutritional deficits. To determine the potential health impact, an in depth analysis of European nutritional needs was therefore conducted.The combination of the fish nutritional and contaminant contents and the nutritional requirements and characteristics of the populations groups enabled SEAwise to design a fish recommendation system. The system is based on a ranked list of fishes that was created in the project and from this, best choices for overall health benefits of each population group was established.More information about the SEAwise project can be found at https://seawiseproject.org/</p

SEAwise report on requirements for fisheries governance to be effective

The SEAwise project works to deliver a fully operational tool that will allow fishers, managers, and policy makers to easily apply Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management (EBFM) in their fisheries. This SEAwise report discusses the concept of governance, how to understand ‘effective’ governance, and a research plan for further studies of the effectiveness of and potential for improving governance at the regional and sub-regional level in the SEAwise regions (Baltic Sea, North Sea, Western Waters, and the Mediterranean Sea). The theoretical insights from the first two main parts inform and are merged into the research plan, forming the last part of the report. The work is based on the recognition that fisheries management in Europe is still struggling to deliver on its objectives relating to ecology, economy, and social considerations although improvements have been made over the last decades. On top of this, marine biodiversity and ecosystem integrity can be identified as pressing challenges, while climate-change presents renewed uncertainties and risks.Improved governance, appropriately designed for Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management (EBFM), is key to improving the system performance towards the societal objectives. Lack of appropriate measures towards cooperation between the EU, national, and regional levels has led to uncoordinated decision-making processes and prevented coherent management through the implementation and adoption of EU legislation, leading to lower than desired performance both of fisheries and environmental policies. Referring specifically to the involvement of stakeholders, the European Commission stresses the importance of transparency, cooperation, outreach, information, and inclusiveness in developing and implementing measures to ensure that all stakeholders, not least fishers, have a say in the management process, and that their needs and concerns are considered (European Commission, 2023a). Improvement of what can broadly be defined as ‘governance’ is, thus, among the pathways that the European Commission has identified for improvements in the area.In SEAwise, we understand governance as a social process, mediated by a variety of social actors: governments, regional authorities, private industry, and civil society. As such, governance is “the whole of public as well as private interactions taken to solve societal problems and create societal opportunities. It includes the formulation and application of principles guiding those interactions and care for institutions that enable them” (Kooiman & Bavinck, 2005, p. 17). Following this, effective governance requires that this constellation of actors is able to speak to each other, coordinate activities, be included in decision-making processes, and work together to define, frame and understand problems, and ultimately, come to solutions. It is, consequently, the effectiveness of the governance ‘set-up’ for such interactions that is studied under Task 2.4. The outputs of this social process in the shape of policy interventions and management measures, affecting e.g., fisheries practices, are typically evaluated through indicators for performance vis-à-vis ecology, economy, and social aspects. However, for governance, a fourth set of attributes and indicators has to come into play.In responding to this, the evaluation of the effectiveness of fisheries governance in the EU is informed by two sources: i) the approach taken by the Canadian Fisheries Research Network (CFRN) (reported in Stephenson et al. 2017a, 2017b, 2018), which constitutes a framework for comprehensively evaluating fisheries and includes potential performance indicators selected from a comprehensive review of the literature (comparing a wide variety of existing frameworks); and ii) the Aquaculture Governance Indicators (AGIs) framework (Toonen at al. 2021), which not only provides a comprehensive governance framework but operationalizes it via scoring of specific indicators and criteria across the core components of governance.The CFRN framework operates with three overall institutional (or governance) objectives: a) legal objectives, b) good governance structure, and c) effective decision-making processes, which are then further decomposed into attributes of these objectives. As an example, attributes under ‘effective decision-making processes’, include (among others) concerns around participation, transparency, structuredness, and integration. The CFRN framework goes on to suggest candidate indicators for these attributes. The CFRN framework are supplemented with insights from the AGIs framework, which serves to provider further insight in how to go from specific indicators and to criteria that these can be measured according to.In the final section, a plan for further work under Task 2.4 is outlined. The plan involves focussing on both the overall regional governance arrangements in the Baltic Sea, North Sea, Western Waters and the Mediterranean Sea, and in-depth studies of sub-regional cases of fisheries governance in the same regions. The analysis of the cases will result in recommendations on how the effectiveness of governance could be improved.Using the governance elements outline in the first section of the deliverable as a lens to approach the research undertaken under Task 2.4, a two-pronged research plan allowing comprehensive understanding of the general nature and quality (i.e., how effective) of governance arrangements is outlined in the final section. The first prong is through the implementation of an expert elicitation survey, which is comprised of specific governance-related questions that is sent to the diverse range of governance actors across sectors (academia/research, civil society, government) for each of the SEAwise regional seas (at regional level). The second prong consists of a selection of in-depth sub-regional case studies informed by SEAwise partners based on their experiences and existing knowledge while also leveraging their research network to inform the details of the case study through for instance interviews.The outlined research plan is designed to deal with multi-level dynamics of fisheries governance (level of the regional seas and sub-regional level) and can accommodate the study of ‘socially acceptable’ management measures, and how social acceptance of management measures might be increased by considering increased use of self-governance (or other improvements to the governance arrangement studied).More information about the SEAwise project can be found at https://seawiseproject.org/</p

SEAwise Report on review guidelines

This deliverable report provides the framework, guidelines, and specific instructions for systematic reviews to be undertaken with SEAwise. The report also includes pre-registered review protocols for five key systematic reviews focussing on the social effects of and on fishing, ecological effects on fisheries yield, ecological effects of fisheries, spatial management impacts, and evaluation of management strategies. The results of these reviews are reported in subsequent x.1 deliverable reports and will provide a synthesis of foundational knowledge for each of SEAwise’s work packages two-through-six, respectively.  This report contains a brief overview of the motivation for undertaking a series of systematic reviews and the selected framework that is being employed for all reviews across the project. Furthermore, this report provides detailed instructions for carrying out each step of a systematic review which can be applied to both the key SEAwise reviews, but also any other review either within or outside of this project. This includes, descriptions of how important databases function, R-scripts for processing records from databases and approaches to data-management for large collaborative reviews.  Additionally, this report serves as the repository for the search protocols for five reviews. These protocols ensure transparent methods and reduced bias in the searching, screening and data extraction.  The success of the coordination across five large-scale systematic reviews is illustrated in the coherence of the approaches and detailed methods described in this report. This report describes results of the SEAwise project. More information about the project can be found at https://seawiseproject.org/</p

SEAwise Data Management Plan

   This report describes the SEAwise data procedures and guidelines with the aim to increase the awareness about the data collected, processed and stored in the project, to ensure that all relevant data collected and used in the project is available in a well-documented, discoverable, standardised and easily accessible form, to give information on data quality and sampling protocols and, to clearly state the usage rights on the different data and to ensure use and handling of data is in accordance with Regulation 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data (General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR).  Sharing research knowledge and data is integral to the SEAwise project and this is attained through implementing the FAIR principles, employing dedicated quality assurance processes and carefully considering ethical aspects of knowledge and data storing and sharing. </p

SEAwise Report on scoping workshops

The SEAwise stakeholder integration aims to ensure that the key issues of relevance, current ecosystem status, potential management measures are identified and prioritised for further evaluation in the project and hence that the end results are relevant to the end users. This deliverable report describes the approach taken to identify the stakeholder community, stakeholder interests and responsibility and subsequently establish ecological and social system priorities. The SEAwise consultations in the first half year of the project had the specific aims to identify key stakeholders, build trust and common understanding between SEAwise scientists and these stakeholders, identify key issues of relevance for ecosystem based fisheries advice, current ecosystem status and potential management measures, identify priorities of these key issues and evaluate how this varies between consultation methods and regions. Stakeholders were contacted through the Mediterranean Advisory Council (MEDAC), Southwestern Waters Advisory Council (SWWAC), Northwestern Waters Advisory Council (NWWAC), North Sea Advisory Council (NSAC). Pelagic Advisory Council (PELAC) and Baltic Sea Advisory Council (BSAC). Scientists participating in the project completed the same exercises for comparison. The choice of consultation method was chosen to enhance equal influence of all participants by minimising the impact of the organising scientists’ expectations and emergent group dynamics on group results. Three different approaches were used (individual consultation: 79 contributors, individual consultation in a group environment: 106 contributors and group consultation: 106 contributors). In total, 2752 key issues were identified. Six issues were identified repeatedly across regions and participant groups: climate change, MPAs, windfarms, employment and small scale fisheries. The remaining words often were identified only by either SEAwise scientists or stakeholders and there were frequent instances where one of these group identified a word in the top 10 whereas the other group did not mention the word. The results highlight the importance of scoping the key topics beyond the scientists participating in the project and the need to consider consultation methods thoroughly. Moving forward in SEAwise, the individual scoping results will be used to identify issues which interested users may first search for and the workshop cloud scoping together with the individual scoping results to identify key topics for advice. The differences between SEAwise participant and stakeholder key topics will be used in the project to raise awareness of the need to talk to end users about the advice produced in advance. This report describes results of the SEAwise project. More information about the project can be found at https://seawiseproject.org/</p

SEAwise report on the bycatch mortality risk of potentially endangered and threatened species of fish, seabirds, reptiles and mammals

The SEAwise project works to deliver a fully operational tool that will allow fishers, managers, and policy makers to easily apply Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management (EBFM) in their fisheries and bycatch of protected, endangered and threatened (PET) species is a major concern in EBFM implementation. This SEAwise report evaluates the effects of fishing on bycatch of PET species by applying a hierarchical framework that moves from qualitative to quantitative methodologies depending on species vulnerability to bycatch and data availability. By these means, this work identifies current areas of highest bycatch risk across the case studies and assesses the sustainability of bycatch levels on PET populations.The first step of this report consisted of the application of the semi-quantitative Productivity-Susceptibility Analysis (PSA) to a wide range of sensitive species across European waters, including cetaceans, bony and cartilaginous fishes and a single seabird species. PSA measures the risk of a species to over-exploitation by a fishery based on two properties; productivity, defined by the life history characteristics determining the intrinsic rate of population increase, and susceptibility, based on the interactions between population and fishing dynamics. This analysis scores species’ productivity and susceptibility attributes from 1 (low risk) to 3 (high risk) for each fishery or gear of interest, allowing a rapid screening of the species most likely affected by bycatch.Cetaceans were assessed in the Bay of Biscay and Irish waters, and in both cases, gillnets were identified as the gears with the highest bycatch risk, especially for common dolphin (Delphinus delphis) and harbour porpoise (Phocoena phocoena). Cartilaginous fishes were assessed in the Mediterranean Sea, including pelagic species such as the blue shark (Prionace glauca) and demersal species such as the longnose spurgod (Squalus blainville), the bull ray (Aetomylaeus bovinus) and the common smooth-hound (Mustelus mustelus). The blue shark, which is Critically Endangered in the Mediterranean, showed a high risk of being bycaught by pelagic longline, while demersal species were all highly threatened by bottom trawlers. A combination of elasmobranchs and teleost fishes was assessed along the North Sea, Bay of Biscay, and Celtic Seas, including common skate complex (Dipturus spp.), blonde ray (Raja brachyura), spurdog (Squalus acanthias), tope (Galeorhinus galeus), spotted ray (Raja montagui), undulate ray (Raja undulata), starry ray (Amblyraja radiata), John dory (Zeus faber), Atlantic wolffish (Anarhichas lupus) and Atlantic halibut (Hippoglossus hippoglossus). Highest bycatch risk was found for the common skate complex, spurdog and tope, showing highest bycatch risk for both beam- and otter trawls, as well as gillnets. The only seabird species analysed was the critically endangered Balearic shearwater (Puffinus mauretanicus), which showed a high risk to longlines in the Bay of Biscay.Where quantitative data were available for populations size and bycatch in e.g, ICES reports, the impact of fisheries bycatch was estimated quantitively by estimating reference points and by comparing them to total bycatch mortalities. This quantitative assessment was completed for two cetaceans and two elasmobranch species that were also included in the previous step. Bycatch impact for the common dolphin in the Northeast Atlantic and for harbour porpoise in Irish waters was found to be unsustainable, as current bycatch mortalities are above the “allowable” capture limits in both cases. For spurdog and undulate ray in the Northeast Atlantic and English Channel, respectively, the fishing pressure on the stock was sustainable, as it is below the harvest rate of Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY). Reference points for seabirds were also estimated, but no comparison with bycatch mortality could be done due to lack of data. Additionally, quantitative assessments were produced for grey seal in the North Sea and loggerhead turtle in the Mediterranean (despite not being included in the previous step), where current bycatch rates were evaluated to be sustainable.Specific analyses were conducted for the Baltic Sea harbour porpoise with previously unused bycatch data from gillnets. Bycatch was modelled to estimate total bycatch mortality, addressing several objectives at once. On one hand, estimated total bycatch was compared with reference points, which showed that the current bycatch level was unsustainable for the population. Secondly, estimated total bycatch was compared with the results provided by previous simpler extrapolations, demonstrating that the later should not be applied when the fishery is heterogeneous due to the potential to provide biased estimates.Overall, the qualitative approaches are commonly used as a tool to identify species that are minimally affected, so the more intensive analysed are limited to high-risk species. Here, most species analysed showed-medium-high risk and therefore, all of them should have been analysed in further steps. However, many of those species lack the necessary information to conduct a quantitative assessment, and as result, the impact of bycatch at population level could only be evaluated, as seen above, for a few of them. This highlights the need for more exhaustive data collection and further research that could answer to the requirements of the EBFM.More information about the SEAwise project can be found at https://seawiseproject.org/</p