The big theme running through #Gap2 's International Symposium in Barcelona this week was the increasing number of fishermen willing to provide fishing data - and not just historic data but live data - and an increasing desire by scientists and researchers to use that data for the management of effort. Simplistically put, at present there is a huge two year plus lag in the time that catch data gets ratified by the management processes that govern CFP quotas - increasingly fishermen are seeing the results of their effort and selectivity approach to fishing produce huge hauls of fish - consistently in areas where there are supposed to be low stocks!
The paper below considers how things could be different and provides a way forward to use fisher's data.
All of the Gap2 presentations can be viewed via the Bambuser website and the agenda here @GAP2_project account, and follow hastags #GAP2IS, #collaboration and #GAP2simposio: