Danish seine is an active fishing gear targeting demersal species, such as European plaice (Pleuronectes platessa, hencefort referred as plaice), a commercially important fish species in the North Sea, Skagerrak, Kattegat, and Baltic Sea. Danish seining is a relevant fishery in relation to exemption from the European Union landing obligation. Trials were conducted from a commercial fishing vessel during the summer with high air temperatures and sea salinity and marked salinity and temperature gradients (pycnocline). Video equipment was used to observe fish entering the seine. Captured fish were individually tagged and housed in livewells for ten days to observe short-term survival. Reflex impairments and external injuries were assessed after capture and at the end of the observation periods using reflex action mortality predictor (RAMP) and catch-damage index (CDI) methodologies. We found that plaice entered the seine late in the towing process and that 87 % of the assessed fish survived, after 10 days of observation. There was a significant difference in short-term survival curves for fish that had been subjected to more than 30 min of on-deck during the catch-sorting process relative to those that had remained on deck for 30 min or less. The association between the time on deck and RAMP scores after capture was also significant. External injuries were primarily minor bruises, fin fraying, and net marks and changed little from after capturing to the end of the observation period.
Commercial small-scale fisheries along the Baltic Sea coasts have declined over the years although these fisheries are viewed as important for coastal development and food security at the local, national, and EU levels. The viability and future of small-scale fisheries are severely challenged by problems caused by grey seals. The conflict, occurring between Baltic Sea coastal fisheries and conservation of the grey seals, has been severe since the mid-1990s and continues despite attempts to find a more balanced situation. Resting on reviews of multiple material, this paper explores the state-of-the-art opportunities for mitigating the seal-fisheries conflict and asks how these are related to social struggles and social justice. Our paper concludes that co-existence of coastal fisheries and the grey seal is possible but necessitates political will and co-designed seal management plans that help implement context-specific measures. Seal deterrents, for instance, give hope as a supplementary conflict mitigation measure – along with seal-proof fishing gear – but provide only partial relief. From the fisheries sector’s position, influencing the size of the seal population is a logical solution. The lifting of the EU trade ban of seal products as a regional derogation would allow sustainable management of seal populations so that they be used as renewable natural resource. Monitoring changes in the seal population is crucial for maintaining a balanced population. Reaching co-existence is timely, because – unlike the seal – the diverse Baltic coastal fishing culture is increasingly endangered.
The purpose of this project is therefore to develop a software tool that can implement an automated intelligent registration (artificial intelligence) of the catch of cod on board the vessel. The project can both support the ongoing camera projects, but also functions as a forward-looking method where the concept of this approach is that the camera focuses on the catch and can be implemented without human supervision. This has a number of potential advantages, including that human supervision is avoided, the number of cameras can probably be reduced to just one (although possibly a stereo camera), labor resources are saved by automated monitoring, it will be possible to reduce the amount of data, fishermen can target selective fishing based on the information obtained, increased precision in relation to possible legal
use of the observations and overall it will reduce costs. The project supports the monitoring that has been initiated in the Kattegat, but should also be seen as a future development, including internationally, where the focus is on building monitoring/surveillance around the use of images as documentation of the catch. An extremely important element of the project is to create a high-quality dataset that can be used internationally to improve algorithms and intensify research.
Cod stocks in the Danish inland waters and the Baltic Sea have collapsed today. Fishing vessels have therefore been required to install video cameras that film the catch for control purposes. The use of artificial intelligence for automated documentation of the catch is therefore a promising solution for control as well as research and management purposes that can contribute to rebuilding cod stocks and ensuring sustainable fishing in the future.
Critical maritime infrastructure protection has become a priority in ocean governance, particularly in Europe. Increased geopolitical tensions, regional conflicts, and the Nord Stream pipeline attacks in the Baltic Sea of September 2022 have been the main catalysts for this development. Calls for enhancing critical maritime infrastructure protection have multiplied, yet, what this implies in practice is less clear. This is partially a question of engineering and risk analysis. It also concerns how the multitude of actors involved can act concertedly. Dialogue, information sharing, and coordination are required, but there is a lack of discussion about which institutional set ups would lend themselves. In this article, we argue that the maritime counter-piracy operations off Somalia, as well as maritime cybersecurity governance hold valuable lessons to provide new answers for the institutional question in the critical maritime infrastructure protection agenda. We start by clarifying what is at stake in the CMIP agenda and why it is a major contemporary governance challenge. We then examine and assess the instruments found in maritime counter-piracy and maritime cybersecurity governance, including why and how they provide effective solutions for enhancing critical maritime infrastructure protection. Finally, we assess the ongoing institution building for CMIP in Europe. While we focus on the European experience, our discussion on designing institutions carries forward lessons for CMIP in other regions, too.
The aim of this paper is to provide the foundations for the development of a spatial decision-support toolset that combines cumulative impacts and ecosystem service supply assessments to support what-if scenario analysis in a maritime spatial planning context. Specifically, a conceptual framework for a toolset has been designed in order to introduce a new approach for place-based assessments of change in relative ecosystem service supply in multiple services at a time due to changes in cumulative impacts. Central to the toolset are two pre-existing approaches for relative ecosystem service supply and cumulative impact assessments and tools that facilitate them. The tools take advantage of available data from various sources, including geodata and expert knowledge, and have already been proven to support maritime spatial planning in a real-world context. To test the new approach and demonstrate the outputs, an ecosystem service supply assessment was done manually using the two currently separate tools. The results of the test case ecosystem service supply assessment for the Gulf of Riga in the Baltic Sea are also presented in this paper and illustrate the assessment steps and data needs. Although presently the focus of the illustrative assessment is the Gulf of Riga, the toolset will be able to accommodate analysis of cumulative impacts and service supply of any location, leaving the scope of the assessment to be determined by the objectives of the assessment as well as data availability (i.e., geospatial data availability and extent of expert knowledge).
The aim of this paper is to provide the foundations for the development of a spatial decision-support toolset that combines cumulative impacts and ecosystem service supply assessments to support what-if scenario analysis in a maritime spatial planning context. Specifically, a conceptual framework for a toolset has been designed in order to introduce a new approach for place-based assessments of change in relative ecosystem service supply in multiple services at a time due to changes in cumulative impacts. Central to the toolset are two pre-existing approaches for relative ecosystem service supply and cumulative impact assessments and tools that facilitate them. The tools take advantage of available data from various sources, including geodata and expert knowledge, and have already been proven to support maritime spatial planning in a real-world context. To test the new approach and demonstrate the outputs, an ecosystem service supply assessment was done manually using the two currently separate tools. The results of the test case ecosystem service supply assessment for the Gulf of Riga in the Baltic Sea are also presented in this paper and illustrate the assessment steps and data needs. Although presently the focus of the illustrative assessment is the Gulf of Riga, the toolset will be able to accommodate analysis of cumulative impacts and service supply of any location, leaving the scope of the assessment to be determined by the objectives of the assessment as well as data availability (i.e., geospatial data availability and extent of expert knowledge).
This report discusses the concept of governance, how to understand 'effective' governance, and a research plan for further studies of the effectiveness of and potential for improving governance at the regional and sub-regional level in the SEAwise regions (Baltic Sea, North Sea, Western Waters, and the Mediterranean Sea). The theoretical insights from the first two main parts inform and are merged into the research plan, forming the last part of the report. The work is based on the recognition that fisheries management in Europe is still struggling to deliver on its objectives relating to ecology, economy, and social considerations although improvements have been made over the last decades. On top of this, marine biodiversity and ecosystem integrity can be identified as pressing challenges, while climate change presents renewed uncertainties and risks.
Improved governance, appropriately designed for Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management (EBFM), is key to improving the system performance towards the societal objectives. Lack of appropriate measures towards cooperation between the EU, national, and regional levels has led to uncoordinated decision-making processes and prevented coherent management through the implementation and adoption of EU legislation, leading to lower than desired performance both of fisheries and environmental policies. Referring specifically to the involvement of stakeholders, the European Commission stresses the importance of transparency, cooperation, outreach, information, and inclusiveness in developing and implementing measures to ensure that all stakeholders, not least fishermen, have a say in the management process, and that their needs and concerns are considered (European Commission, 2023a). Improvement of what can broadly be defined as 'governance' is, thus, among the pathways that the European Commission has identified for improvements in the area.
The concept of 'seal-fishery conflict' is used when referring to the complex contradictions stemming from seals' impacts on fishing livelihoods, a pertinent social struggle between stakeholder groups of the Baltic Sea. Tensions are most remarkable between coastal fisheries and seal conservationists. As existing knowledge has been scattered and the conflict has become increasingly problematic, the RESOCO project compiled Nordic knowledge and best practices and built an interdisciplinary synthesis to set the stage for alternative solutions on how to effectively reconcile the seal-fishery conflict in the Baltic Sea. The report takes a pragmatic stand by turning the attention to approaches and instruments that have been suggested to be helpful or that have the potential to help mitigate the conflict. The report synthesizes knowledge and presents existing gaps and needs of further research.
Collaborative spatial decision support tools can contribute with setups for including stakeholders into marine spatial planning (MSP) processes with the purpose of increasing trust in planning outcomes, facilitate knowledge co-creation and shared planning goals, and provide transparent, scientific, inclusive, and technical foundations for planning. A new collaborative spatial decision support setup based on the combination of functionalities from two spatial decision support tools called SEANERGY and Baltic Explorer was designed for and tested in a workshop in 2020 targeted local authorities, NGOs, and citizens in Denmark with an interest in MSP. While the setup needs further testing among a wider span of stakeholders to support a pluralistic approach, the findings illustrate promising potentials from ranking conflicts and synergies in collaborative settings to make marine activity interests spatially visible in MSP and gain an overview of opportunities for sea use multi-functionality in context-based, interactive, goal-oriented stakeholder processes. The use of a visual platform such as Baltic Explorer to systematically explore locations of marine uses was positively evaluated to facilitate the workshop conflict-synergy discussions. Challenges relate to how to deal with disagreements on conflict-synergy scores and the subjectivity of opinions, but the demonstrated flexible, quick, transparent way to test the sensitivity of spatial patterns to differences in input conflict-synergy scores is found to provide a promising setup for including stakeholder opinions through collaborative settings, a setup adjustable to supplementary large-scale, individual, more representative surveys as well.