MARE Co-funding (KB-24-005-017)

This project has trialled the way sampling designs would be developed in a regional setting and showed that collaboration and consultation is required at face to face meetings through regional

groups that focus on a particular group of fisheries. The project was the first step in this process and one of the main outcomes is the framework to take the process forward; developing data formats, data sharing agreements and easily accessible software for data sharing, checking and analysis, and for the simulation testing of sampling designs. These designs are predicated on common data collection protocols and the use of the appropriate statistical estimators; the implementation of such designs would thus require the adoption of the standard survey sampling techniques and the use of common sampling and estimation routines by the sampling institutions.

 

The main findings of four commercial fishery case studies were that considerable improvements can be made by adopting regional designs, by which we mean the adoption of a common metric used for stratification (such as port size or fleet segments etc), though with the nation being retained as a level of stratification within the overall design. Such designs would potentially provide unbiased and more precise estimates than the coordinated national data collection schemes operating at present.

 

The main issues found in the operation of national sampling designs at present is the incomplete sampling coverage of the regional population, and that the allocation of sampling effort unilaterally at national level does not represent the best use of the available resource.

 

A major remit of the project was to develop guidelines to evaluate the quality of data at national and

regional levels using shared tools. To that end an R library has been developed and made available

on a public access website (https://github.com/ldbk/fishPifct).