Elsevier

Progress in Oceanography

Volume 166, September 2018, Pages 2-3
Progress in Oceanography

Multidisciplinary integrated surveys: Objectives, achievements and future directions

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pocean.2018.03.015Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Integrated surveys developed by adding new sampling protocols to existing surveys.

  • They are a response to integrated fisheries and environment policies.

  • They provide relevant data for ecosystem description and assessment.

  • Next steps will concern integration, automation, and big-data analytical framework.

Introduction

Over the last two decades, fisheries surveys have shifted their focus, from providers of data for single fish stock assessments to become platforms for the multidisciplinary integrated monitoring of ecosystems (including the continued provision of the data necessary for assessing fish stocks). Such change in focus was possible in part because new research vessels built in the 1990s were sufficiently large and equipped for multidisciplinary teams to work simultaneously onboard. The shift in survey objectives, and the data provided, supported changes in policies for implementing ecosystem based approaches. In many countries around the Atlantic, sectoral fisheries management is now embedded into ecosystem conservation and environmental legislation. Similarly, integrated maritime policies now require collecting data on major ecosystem components to monitor the achievement of good environmental status. Presently, fisheries surveys undertaken yearly over large marine areas have become the multidisciplinary platforms providing the required data.

Section snippets

Overview of themes in this issue

This Special Issue (SI) highlights solutions found for implementing multidisciplinary integrated surveys, as well as major results obtained.

Next steps for integrated surveys

Multidisciplinary integrated surveys have developed by adding new objectives and sampling protocols to existing fishery surveys, each relevant for a particular ecosystem component. This approach has been transformational. Abundance indices for specific fish stocks are now embedded in a larger ecosystem context with survey data contributing to characterize ecosystem structure and patterns of variability. More process understanding and less structural description is now needed, which will require

Acknowledgements

The coordination of the Spanish and French integrated pelagic surveys in the Bay of Biscay started in 2000 with the support of the EU project Pelasses (DG-Mare project no. 99/010), which also involved Portugal. This SI is in part the result of this adventure, still ongoing. ICES (International Council for the Exploration of the Sea) has been instrumental in this endeavour by providing a forum for the teams involved in the surveys to meet annually. We would like to acknowledge the authors who

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