The objective of the symposium is to attract scientific contributions from around the world: 1) to address biological and socio-economic issues relating to by-catch and discard from commercial fishing operations and the impact of fishing gear on sensitive habitats; and 2) to address the performance and effectiveness of fishing gears used in fishery independent resource and ecosystem surveys. Collectively these issues have not been addressed in any international symposium. The need to do so is made more urgent by the nature of global fisheries where many stocks have collapsed and where there is a clear and pressing need to protect biodiversity and improve our ability to estimate the resource. This symposium will take a fresh look at methods to reduce bycatch and discarding in commercial fishing operations, explore practical solutions to prevent destruction of sensitive habitat and investigate new methods to increase the performance and catching efficiency of survey fishing gears used to estimate resource abundance. Fundamental to understanding the impact of commercial fishery operations is an understanding of industry perspectives on the effectiveness of technical measures such as mesh size, gear exclusion, regulations and their role in conservation, including socio-economic consequences of introducing new technical measures. A key area which the symposium will address is how to obtain, quantify and integrate industry responses to declining stocks and increasing management regulations into fishery and ecosystem based management advice.
This ICES symposium seeks to:
- Provide a forum for global synthesis of the scientific knowledge of fishing technology and its effects on the ecosystem including bycatch reduction, ecosystem sensitive fishing, sensitive habitat impacts and the precision of resource surveys used in stock assessment.
- Review and discuss advances in technology and analytical methods used to study or mitigate these effects.
- Provide a forum for discussion on how perceptions and decisions of fishers and resource managers impact the success of achieving sustainable use and successful management of fishery resources.
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