Bycatch mitigation

Wednesday’s Annual Science Conference started with a plenary lecture by guest speaker Ed Melvin from the Washington Sea Grant, a part of the University of Washington. His lecture was entitled, “Bycatch mitigation: tales of success and failure across ecosystems, technologies and cultures”. In it, he presented some examples of collaborative efforts between fishers and gear technologists to develop and refine bycatch mitigation technologies that are safe and reliable.

After his lecture he commented, “To find ways to engage or draw out the innovation of fishers and solve problems, then put the right incentives and governance in place. It’s almost a self-regulating process. That’s really where I see sustainable fisheries management going in the long term. A really strong element of that, or a third leg if you will, is data: to actually know what is going on at sea and use that information to solve the problems and basically keep things straight. Without it, there’s a great deal of uncertainty, and the futures of the people involved in fish harvesting are jeopardized. The combination of fishers’ knowledge, incentives, and data is a really powerful combination”.

Developing the ecosystem approach:

A strategy for Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management of the Central Baltic Sea based on the available knowledge of ecosystem functioning
(C:19, Christian Möllmann, DE)

Ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) has recently emerged as an alternative approach to single-species management. The Baltic Sea is a test area for the implementation of ecosystem-based management approaches of human activities, with a number of initiatives and developments towards this goal, e.g. the Baltic Sea Regional Project. However, no detailed strategies for a more holistic management of the Baltic ecosystem have been developed yet, based on the available scientific knowledge in the area. This paper explores the basis for an EBFM-strategy for the Central Baltic Sea with emphasis on the upper trophic levels, i.e. zooplankton, planktivorous and piscivorous fish.