Mixed fisheries pose major challenges to sustainable management, potentially resulting in over quota discards and lost fishing opportunities. There is a growing recognition that mixed fisheries modelling/advice is required to inform sustainable management decisions in the face of evolving challenges (i.e. landings obligation, restrictive quota, PET species, climate change).
This session will explore mixed fisheries modelling, provide valuable information on short-term advice and longer-term strategic decision-making processes, accounting for management decisions and fisheries dynamics.
Fisheries management is typically applied at the level of a single stock, which does not reflect the reality of most fishing operations, where multiple stocks are caught together in a single haul, potentially leading to unwanted catches, lost fishing opportunities, and major challenges to sustainable management. There is a growing recognition that mixed fisheries advice is required to inform management decisions in the face of evolving challenges such as landing obligation, restrictive quota, PET species, and climate change.
Mixed fisheries modelling can provide valuable information for short-term advice, and longer-term strategic decision-making processes that better account for management decisions and changes in fisheries over time. These models can provide platforms to effectively interact with stakeholders to communicate bio-economic trade-offs in a range of management scenarios through decision support tools.
This session focuses on developments in mixed fisheries modelling and its contribution to improving sustainability by welcoming papers on:
- Fishery characterisation forms the basis of effective mixed fisheries modelling. Modelled technical interactions must account for the complex nature of fisheries, at a resolution that is meaningful to the end-users/managers. This requires suitable fleet and métier definitions; identification and treatment of target/bycatch stocks; incorporation of gear-based selectivity; while accounting for fisheries dynamics (seasonality, closures, fisher decisions).
- Decision support tools maximise the utility of mixed fisheries advice. These require the input of end-users in the parametrisation of models, the definition of scenarios, and the format of dissemination tools. We welcome case studies on stakeholder driven exploration of operating models and management scenarios to meet overall fisheries goals such as sustainability and profitability.
- Management strategy evaluation provides a framework that can account for the inherent uncertainty and cumulative impacts of decisions in terms of trade-offs in long-term outcomes, optimisation of fisheries goals across multiple criteria, accounting for environmental change and multispecies interactions.
