Workshop on fisheries overviews 2 (WKFO2; outputs from 2023 meeting)

Fisheries overviews summarize fishing activities in ICES ecoregions, including describing which countries are catching what species, the various fishing methods being used, the distribution and intensity of fishing, the status of fished stocks, how stocks are managed, and what the impacts of fisheries on the ecosystem are. Fisheries overviews are now published for most ICES ecoregions. The second ICES Workshop on Fisheries Overviews (WKFO2) met to review data and scripts used to produce Fisheries Overviews and assess the possible use of new datasets as well as alternative format to the current figures. The work addressed in 2023 included a full description of the workflow to produce the Fisheries Overviews as well as the script and data used. All data used were assessed in term of consistency and completeness. The RDBES format (CL and CE) provides all information needed to produce Fisheries Overviews figures. When available, data in the RDBES were assessed to be very consistent with other data sources. However, only one year of data is currently available, providing any use of that dataset to build time-series. RDBES would also provide information on fishing techniques (rough fleet definition). Having fleet landings effort data would be a valuable information not available in any other database. In the absence of RDBES long time-series, Eurostat datasets was considered suitable for use to indicate long-term trends in the total landings but no information on gear is available. WGMIXFISH landings and effort dataseries provide a usable alternative, but only a decade is available and not all ecoregions are covered by the database. FDI and RDB data were also considered and were not considered to be suitable options where others are available. RDB is incomplete and was not designed to provide effort and landing trends. Furthermore, FDI is subject to confidentiality redactions and since the UK exit from the EU, does not include data from the UK. During the workshop, participants went through mixed-fisheries figures and proposed figures to be harmonized among Fisheries Overviews including an interactive advice product.