Workshop to Update and Assess Trade-Offs Between the Impact of Fisheries on Seafloor Habitats and Their Landings and Economic Performance (WKD6ASSESS)

WKD6ASSESS aimed to provide an updated assessment of bottom trawl impact versus financial gain in all European waters, for the status quo and under various future management scenarios. In this, the latest developments made in various ICES working groups and workshops should be integrated, and the entire process should be aligned. Largest changes in the assessment include a new method to represent the financial gain of the fisheries; the inclusion of management scenarios in line with pertinent marine policies, for instance considering the closure of Marine Protected Areas; progress in multiple regions (including the Mediterranean Sea) to enable the assessment across all EU waters; and the development of a new user-friendly layout for the presentation of the assessment results. Unfortunately, the progress (mainly in term of data coverage) for the Mediterranean Sea has not yet reached a level that enables operationalizing the assessment at (eco)regional scales. In addition, the data flows for more accurate economic indicators are not yet guaranteed for coming years. Overall, the improvements implemented and presented in this report forms a solid basis for the establishment of a comprehensible and reproducible assessment of bottom trawl impact in all European waters

Workshop on Trade-offs between the Impact of Fisheries on Seafloor Habitats and their Landings and Economic Performance (WKTRADE4)

The Workshop on Trade-offs between the Impact of Fisheries on Seafloor Habitats and their Landings and Economic Performance (WKTRADE4) met three times with the objectives to: a) operationalize linking of available VMS, STECF FDI and AER economic data to estimate landings and economic performance indicators of each fishery. b) describe the practical steps to determine the economic costs and benefits associated with bottom fishing at a fine spatial scale using FDI-like data; c) demonstrate the applicability of proposed approaches for estimating spatial fisheries performance indicators (including revenue, costs, landings, value added, etc.) at local, habitat and regional scales and for different gear/metiers given the present data availability and cross regional applicability. The purpose is to demonstrate what measures of these economic performance indicators can be used in WGFBIT to describe trade-offs; d) to address objectives a to c in all European marine regions, including the Mediterranean and Black Seas, to the extent possible; e) and, for the regions represented document opportunity and limitations of spatial fisheries performance indicators (including revenue, costs, landings, value added, etc.) and/or of the input data needed and the capacity to link to benthic impact. For this workshop, the group has compared different approaches of use of FDI and AER data and it’s use for spatial analysis. It operationalized the links between three data calls (for NAO region), outlined limits and problems of methods used by different approaches. Although important progress has been made, this framework is still evolving and much still needs to be done to improve the resolution of primary data and resolve various misalignment issues. The group evidenced that the spatial resolution of the FDI data is very low, especially in Meds and Black Sea, and that the VMS/Logbook data are lacking for Med and Black Sea, as well as that there are gaps in the FDI data (e.g. landing value). Finally, the group demonstrated that the structure of the FDI data for Med and Black Seas is adequate for the analysis in terms of spatial data; however, to provide useful advice at MPAs level, higher resolution and more complete spatial data is needed, e.g. similar data collated from the ICES VMS data call for the Northeast Atlantic area. The group envisioned that the future work would consist of acquiring better resolution needed for data to perform more precise analyses, collating national studies which would be required for a better understanding of economic data availability at lower than the EU DCF aggregation level, and using existing samples collected and possibly re-stratified economic data to access regional differences whenever more precise and spatial level economic analyses will be collated in the future