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 Report on the key social and economic aspects of regional fisheries

Fishing is a human activity with various social and economic implications. In most countries, those implications are key factors to consider when deciding on specific management strategies. In this report, the fisheries management strategies implemented in the different European marine regions are reviewed, and relevant indicators, models and tools that can be used to predict the effectiveness of these strategies, from a social and economic point of view are identified. The objective was to identify the critical social and economic aspects of fisheries,  relevant social and economic indicators, and regionally‐relevant management measures to be considered in the evaluations of different management strategies later in the project.   The scoping consultations and systematic reviews identified a long list of potentially relevant key social and economic aspects and management measures. Among these, the most frequently mentioned items identified in scoping with stakeholders were windfarms, employment/jobs, MPAs, food supply, small-scale fisheries, local communities and pollution. The systematic review identified landings (volume or value), effort (days at sea), fuel costs, number of vessels, profit, aspects of costs, economic performance, sustainability-resilience, compliance and capacity as frequently occurring topics. The fisheries management policies most frequently mentioned were effort control, landing obligation, Individual Transferable Quota (ITQ), MPAs and TAC. Among the papers analyzed, more than 30%, concerned the Mediterranean region, followed by Western Waters, the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, indicating a higher contribution of Mediterranean studies to the conclusions. Aspects identified frequently in both scoping and in systematic reviews included MPAs and small-scale fisheries, which were all identified in both methods as frequently occurring. However, there were also aspects which appeared to be represented differently in the evaluations (e.g. employment and local communities) indicating discrepancies between the available knowledge and that sought by the end users. The report describes results from the SEAwise project. More information can be found at https://seawiseproject.org/</p