The North Sea Groundfish Survey is the longest running fisheries time-series that Cefas runs. In the early 1960's European institutes were running their own small scale pelagic surveys (mostly herring as at the time this was a very valuable fish in the North Sea). Then in the mid 1960's a group called the International Young Fish Survey group, formed and started to try and standardise all countries survey protocols. Finally in the 1990's this group (now called the International Bottom Trawl Survey Working Group), managed to get each participating country (8 in total), to use the same gear, the same sampling protocols and now we are even putting all of our collected data into the same place (DATRAS, an ICES data centre data portal).
It is difficult to imagine the amount of time and effort required to get all of the participating countries to do this ( at least one 5 day meeting a year as well and countless hours during long days at sea), but the outcome is a well coordinated, highly successful survey series that contributed to more than 11 stocks for ICES stock assessment and numerous additional scientific uses, including work for PhD and Masters students, as well as internal Cefas and Defra science, that will be used to inform the future of fisheries science and stock assessments. As we fish around the grid, we collect data that will be quality controlled, uploaded to databases and examined, in order to provide the highest quality data for the uses mentioned above. Cefas prides itself on the production of this high quality data and invests time in training its entire fisheries sea-going staff, to make sure they are all trained to the highest possible level.
On this survey we have one "new to fisheries surveys" staff member that, by the time she leaves the vessel at the mid survey break in Aberdeen, will be able to use the Electronic Data Capture system (EDC, described in last year's blog), biological sample a number of commercial fish species and identify the majority of the fish species that we catch during the first half of the survey.
Cheryl learning one of the many skills needed to carrying out the NSGFS.