Southern Baltic Sea - Polish EEZ

Fishery characterisation

The primary goal of the project has been to secure the improvement of the assessment of commercial important fish stocks in the Baltic Sea and Kattegat by continuation of the process towards a fully co-ordinated sampling scheme of the catch of commercial vessels and by a continuation of the time series of discard sampling. Moreover, the aim of the study project was to improve the collection of catch data on cod, herring, sprat, flounder and by-catch from commercial fishing vessels in order to get a complete description of the fishing pattern in the area. The data are used as input for fish stock assessment in the area. In addition the project will transfer the data collected during this and previous studies to a web based version of the existing common database and update the common sampling manual. The project has included the following activities: - sampling data directly from the commercial fishing fleet, - updating the fish sampling manual, - servicing the IBSSP database. The following countries participated in the project: Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Poland, Russia and Sweden. Observers collect the data while they are on board the vessels during active normal commercial fishery. The observers collect all relevant information concerning the fishery including catch weight per species (separated into landing- and discard part), length distributions, gear and haul information, etc. The data collected by all participated institutes were checked and are stored in a common database, the IBSSP database (at present call BALTCOM), which is kept in both DIFRES and the Secretariat of ICES. The data collected by Poland are stored in the SFI in an Excel format database.

National Marine Fisheries Research Institute
Kollataja 1
Gdynia

81-332
Poland