Workshop on estimation of MOrtality of Marine MAmmals due to Bycatch (WKMOMA)

• Main Author: ICES
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: ICES 2021
• Subjects: envir; demo; Norway; Faroes; Harbour porpoise; Phocoena phocoena
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.17895/ices.pub.9257; https://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/00743/85495/90606.pdf; https://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/00743/85495/

The Workshop on estimation of MOrtality of Marine MAmmals due to Bycatch (WKMOMA) addressed a special request from OSPAR regarding the bycatch mortality of marine mammals (harbour porpoise Phocoena phocoena; common dolphin Delphinus delphis; and grey seal Halicho-erus grypus) within the OSPAR maritime area. The objective of the workshop was to generate bycatch rates and associated confidence intervals for static and towed gears for relevant species within the three species assessment areas defined by OSPAR. Subsequently, the species-specific bycatch mortality estimates in the defined assessment area were requested. OSPAR provided thresholds for the relevant species/assessment units and ICES were tasked to compare the mor-tality estimates to the provided thresholds and identify any critical issues relevant for the com-parison. ICES issued an official data call requesting 18 of the 20 ICES countries with fisheries operating in the OSPAR area to provide data. Norway, the Faroes, and Russia did not submit bycatch mon-itoring and effort in response to the data call, and it was therefore not possible to estimate bycatch in these waters. The data call aimed to collect data describing total bycatch monitoring/sampling effort and grey seal, harbour porpoise and common dolphin bycatch incidents from the years 2005 until 2020 from fisheries operating in the OSPAR Region. Most of the contacted countries submitted data, but the quality and quantity of the data provided varied widely among nations. Regarding data on fishing effort, ICES asked all EU member states for permission to use fishing effort data held in the ICES Regional Database (RDB) which contains data on fishing effort data in various metrics by métier level, country, vessel size and ICES rectangle. When permission was granted, a data extraction was undertaken by the ICES data centre providing effort data from 2015 to 2020. All submitted monitored effort data from 2005 until 2021 was summarized and resulted in a total of 884 common dolphins, 1221 harbour ...