Coming up with realistic measures of the true economic value of any fished areas lies at the heart of providing managers with options on how to most cost effectively reduce the environmental impact of bottom fishing on seafloor habitats.
Most management scenarios and their respective trade-offs often rely on knowledge-based static approaches. However, we know that both the behaviour of individual fishers and the ecosystem (with its fish stocks) may adapt to any changes imposed on them dynamically. Building on the work of a 2017 workshop on evaluating trade-offs between the impact on seafloor habitats and provisions of catch/value (
WKTRADE), WKTRADE2 reviews and tests state-of-the-art modelling techniques that can inform regional scale knowledge-based static approaches.
The workshop will explore smaller scale dynamic modelling techniques that take into account, for example, fish stocks population dynamics, displacement of fishing effort and/or effort re-allocation across fishing fleets. The workshop will suggest a suite of value parameters with varying data needs that can be drawn upon when knowledge-based static approaches are applied at the larger regional scale.
The workshop will use available bio-economic modelling from ICES Working Group on Economics (WGECON) and individual participants. Cross regional generality is important, and the workshop is looking for participants from different geographical areas, e.g. the Baltic Sea, North Sea and Adriatic Sea, etc.
Operational outputs of the workshop will aid ICES Working Group on Fisheries Benthic Impact and Trade-offs (WGFBIT) as modular building blocks in further exploration of trade-offs between different management measures, while ensuring impact of bottom fishing on seafloor habitats is minimised.
Registration
The workshop is chaired by François Bastardie (Denmark) and Jochen Depestele (Belgium) and will meet 4-6 September at ICES Headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark. There is no fee to participate, but registration is required. If you plan to attend, please register at your earliest convenience by contacting Maria Lifentseva at the ICES Secretariat. The meeting will start on Wednesday 4 September at 9:00 and end on Friday 6 September by 15:00.
Note: If the workshop is oversubscribed, ICES reserves the right, in consultation with the workshop Chairs, to select the final workshop participants based on their expertise and geographical distribution.
