Summary

During the last seven years, the Steering Group has been working on key areas of the fishery, focussing on stock health, managing any impacts of fishing on habitat and other species, and better clarifying aspects of fisheries management systems. Since the beginning of this improvement project, our understanding of the health of the monkfish stocks has significantly improved, thanks to a full analytical stock assessment of both species. Bespoke identification guides for ETP species have been created for fishers and a number of research projects have been commissioned.

Annual progress against the FIP’s actions can be seen in the charts opposite.

Next Steps

Over the seven - year lifespan of the monkfish improvement project, this fishery has made significant strides in increasing the knowledge and data underpinning its management. The Monkfish FIP has helped to develop an environment of collaboration and knowledge-sharing in this, and the other related South West Fishery Improvement Projects. To continue progress against the remaining few actions needed for this fishery to aim for MSC certification, a number of recommendations were made by the technical consultants to the FIP, Poseidon.

These recommendations included a need for the fishery to be better informed of the spatial extent and location of the under 12m fleet, and their effect on other species including ETP species, as well as habitat interactions.

Another key action - across all the Project UK FIPs - is to fully understand the benefits and access to data that will come from the implementation of inshore Vessel Monitoring Systems (iVMS) across the small (<12m) vessels in UK waters. While these systems are nearly fully implemented on small vessels, it remains to be seen how the anonymised data will or won’t be made available to third parties, such as an independent fisheries assessor.

For a full list of the remaining actions, milestones, and MSC scoring indicators, please see the Year 7 Annual Review by Poseidon Aquatic Resource Management.