Deliverable 5.5 : SEAwise report on predicting effect of changes in ‘fishable’ areas on fish and fisheries

• Main Authors: Bastardie, Francois, Spedicato, Maria Teresa, Bitetto, Isabella, Romagnoni, Giovanni, Zupa, Walter, Letschert, Jonas, Püts, Miriam, Damalas, Dimitrios, Kavadas, Stefanos, Maina, Irida, Tsagarakis, Konstantinos, Poos, Jan Jaap, Papantoniou, Georgia, Depestele, Jochen, Batts, Luke, Bluemel, Joanna K., Astarloa Diaz, Amaia, van de Wolfshaar, Karen, Binch, Logan, Rindorf, Anna
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Published: Technical University of Denmark 2023
• Subjects: Text; ddc:630; spatial management > fisheries > MPAs > offshore wind; Northeast Atlantic
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.11583/DTU.24331198; https://www.openagrar.de/receive/openagrar_mods_00092685; https://www.openagrar.de/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/openagrar_derivate_00056916/dn067348.pdf

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 fisheries. This SEAwise report aims to investigate the available tools for predicting the impact of various spatial management options on fisheries distribution, yield, profitability, and selectivity. Such spatial plans may affect the remaining ‘fishable’ areas by displacing and concentrating the fishing pressure, and so may alter stock abundances, distributions, size- and species catch composition and fuel expenditure and cost. The report provides early insights into how spatial plans that exclude certain fishing activities may affect these outcomes. Spatially explicit approaches are used, along with scenarios of underlying stock productivities and distributions, to assess the performance of spatial management measures. Scenario-based testing is conducted to examine the interrelated effects of management options and stock productivity. A major aspect of the work involved gathering and organizing information on specific zones from several sources such as Natura2000, CDDA, SPA, SAC, and UK-defined areas. We found that most of these zones did not have any previous management plans in place that would outline fishing restrictions. Therefore, we developed a method of assigning limitations to certain fishing techniques based on the perceived vulnerability of specific areas to these practices. This approach has allowed for an examination of how these restrictions potentially affect fish and fisheries. Initially, we used a static approach in anticipating the potential fishing effort displacement to measure the impact of fishing in the Northeast Atlantic area. Our research shows that while such spatial management measures may reduce fishing opportunities, it may be possible to offset in the short term some of these spatial opportunity losses by fishing in nearby locations (Figure 1). On the Med side, an analysis of fishing effort ...