PELSPA (KB-14-012-052)

Over the past few years, IMARES has been involved in several projects with the pelagic industry to collect acoustic echosounder data from vessels during fishing operations. These projects were/are primarily of an exploratory nature with the majority of the resources going towards focussing on methodology development. At the same time, the projects have increasingly received attention from Dutch Ministries and scientists abroad due to their novelty, science-industry partnership and innovative chgaracter. However, although the developed methods now allow collection of vast amounts of unprecedented data, the resources available to investigate their scientific and management use are sparse.

This project will make use of acoustic data collected in previous & ongoing IMARES science-industry projects to get quantitative information out of them. These data will provide information on migration/distribution of important pelagic fish stocks (herring, horse mackerel, blue whiting) over a wider time period. Statistical analysis methods for these data will be developed and tested and results put into appropriate formats for use by stakeholders, scientists and managers (e.g. maps showing distributional changes of fish stocks over longer time (2-3 months) periods). This will be vital for demonstrating our expertise and advertising science-industry based collaborative projects in the market.