Monitoring seabird bycatch in the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission Regulatory Area ...

• Main Author: ICES
• Format: Report
• Language: unknown
• Published: ICES Business Reports 2024
• Subjects: Fisheries and aquaculture; North East Atlantic
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.17895/ices.pub.21908577; https://ices-library.figshare.com/articles/report/Monitoring_seabird_bycatch_in_the_North_East_Atlantic_Fisheries_Commission_Regulatory_Area/21908577

In 2021, ICES received a special request for advice from the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission (NEAFC) on bird bycatch in the NEAFC Regulatory Area (RA). Scoping exercises to ad-dress this request were carried out in 2021 and 2022 and the main results from that work are summarized in this report. Data on monitoring effort and bycatch events were gathered through annual ICES data calls in 2021 and 2022. Only few EU countries reported limited bycatch monitoring data in the NEAFC RA in response to the data calls while major fishing nations failed to report information. No bird bycatch events were reported. For robust bycatch rate calculations and the ability to generate stratified bycatch estimates at appropriate temporal resolutions, data are needed for each bycatch event including the number of zero-bycatch events. This cannot be achieved currently with the available data. Data on total fishing effort was submitted by NEAFC to ICES through a Memorandum of Un-derstanding that provides annual VMS and ...