Depestele, J.

Polet, H.

Van Craeynest, K.

Van de Walle, S.

Vincx, M.

Open Marine Archive

Subsampling beam trawl catches: a necessary evil 
Van de Walle Samuel1, 2, Jochen Depestele1,2, Hans Polet1, Kris Van Craeynest1 and Magda Vincx2 
1 Instituut voor Landbouw en VisserijOnderzoek (ILVO), Ankerstraat 1, B-8400 Oostende Belgium 
E-mail: Jochen.Depestele@ilvo.vlaanderen.be  
2 Afdeling Mariene Biologie, Vakgroep Biologie, Universiteit Gent, Krijgslaan 281 (Campus Sterre – 
S8), B-9000 Ghent, Belgium 
 
An ecosystem approach to fisheries management shifts the focus from single (commercial) species 
to wider ecosystem functioning. Such an approach requires data from the entire catch, including 
non-commercial species such as e.g. benthic invertebrates in addition to the targeted fish species. 
Such data is rarely readily available from the fisheries industry since it is work intensive and entire 
catches are often too large and difficult to manipulate. Estimating total catch composition will 
therefore have to rely on subsampling in order to obtain estimates. This study focuses on the 
subsample size necessary to obtain reliable estimates of species abundance in flatfish beam trawl 
fisheries in the southern North Sea. 
 
Required size for a representative subsample depends on the area-specific diversity of the catch and 
its mixture during catch handling, but since subsamples were taken from a randomized catch, the 
mixture of the catch was not at stake. Catch diversity and the effect of subsample sizes were 
addressed specifically. A variety of hauls with different total catches were randomly divided into 
10kg boxes. Using an index of relative abundance, each species was classified into different 
categories individually for each haul: rare, common or abundant. This index clearly indicates that 
only few species were highly abundant in most of the sampled hauls, such as Asterias rubens and 
Psammechinus miliaris. A large number of species were categorized as common, such as 
Liocarcinus holsatus and most discarded species were classified as rare (Callionymus lyra, 
Aphrodita aculeata, etc.). Furthermore, a permutation approach was used to identify the number of 
10kg boxes required to reasonably estimate species abundance within different ranges of accuracy. 
This number of boxes required then translates into an acceptable subsample size.  As expected, the 
larger subsample size (i.e. the more boxes used), the higher the accuracy of the species abundance 
estimate. In addition to this, accuracy leveled off at different subsample sizes for the different 
abundance categories. Estimations for abundant species required a lower subsample size than 
estimations for rare species. This study quantifies the abundance specific relationships between 
subsample size and accuracy in detail and allows recommendations for sampling methodology in 
the case off flatfish beam trawl fishery in the southern North Sea. 
 
 
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Subsampling beam trawl catches: a necessary evil

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