SEAwise Report on the pressure induced by fisheries related litter on key species groups.

• Main Authors: Maria Teresa Spedicato, Anna Rindorf, Katerina Anastasopoulou, Oihane C. Basurko, Luke Batts, Casper Willestofte Berg, Matteo Biondi, Pierluigi Carbonara, Renato Casagrandi, Jochen Depestele, Bavo DeWitte, Izaro Goienetxea, Nis Sand Jacobsen, Stefanos Kavadas, Irida Maina, Lorenzo Mari, Paco Melia, Meadhbh Moriarty, Dimitris Politikos, Giovanni Romagnoni, Irene Ruiz, Josie Russell, David Vanvermaete, Celia Vassilopoulou, Walter Zupa, David Reid
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: Conservation and biodiversity; Environmental assessment and monitoring; Environmental management; Marine litter; Single use plastic; Litter on the seafloor; Fisheries litter; Northeast Atlantic; Mediterranean; North East Atlantic
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.11583/dtu.23284649.v1; https://figshare.com/articles/online_resource/SEAwise_Report_on_the_pressure_induced_by_fisheries_related_litter_on_key_species_groups_/23284649

The SEAwise project works to deliver a fully operational tool that will allow fishers, managers, and policy makers to easily apply Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management (EBFM) in their own fisheries. This report provides analyses of the amount of litter on the seafloor using statistical models of trawl survey data on the number and mass of litter items per km2 in different categories. New statistical methods are implemented to estimate the temporal development, the spatial distribution, the overlap of litter with key fish species and their relationship with the spatial distribution of fishing effort. In addition to the traditional categories of litter, new indicators of the amount of litter types of ingestible sizes and litter posing a risk of entanglement were also developed. The analyses were conducted for the Baltic Sea, the North East Atlantic, Irish Waters, the South Adriatic Sea and the Eastern Ionian Sea. Plastic, Single Use Plastic (SUP) and fishing-related litter are ubiquitous with encounter probabilities between 40% and 90% in the North East Atlantic and the Baltic Sea . Lower encounter probabilities were recorded for glass, metal, rubber, and other litter categories with the highest probabilities below 20% (40% for natural litter). Plastic, SUP, rubber, other and fishing-related litter increased steeply in both occurrence and numbers over the sampled 10 years. In 2012, around 20 plastic and 10 fishing related litter items were detected per km2 in the North East Atlantic whereas in the last sampling year, these categories had increased to around 35 plastic and 22 fishing-related items, almost doubling in the 10 sampled years in both categories. A similar rate of increase was seen in litter posing entanglement risk and ingestable litter. Ingestable litter and litter posing a risk of entanglement occurred in the greatest numbers in coastal areas off Germany, Belgium, Holland, France and Spain and along the shelf edge in the Bay of Biscay. Most of the categories of litter in Irish Waters showed a general ...