COFASP - New methodologies for an ecosystem approach to spatial and temporal management of fisheries and aquaculture in coastal areas

During the period of 42 months of ECOAST Project a number of important results have been achieved. The primary aim of the project was to identify, develop and test new methodologies for spatial and temporal management of fisheries and aquaculture in coastal areas. Through GRID software ECOAST assessed synergies and conflicts between human activities in seven case studies across Europe: 1) Adriatic Sea, 2) Ionian Sea, 3) Black Sea, 4) Tyrrhenian Sea, 5) Baltic Sea, 6) Norwegian Fjords and 7) NE Atlantic Coasts. In addition, in such case studies ECOAST evaluated the impact of fisheries and aquaculture on coastal ecosystems, including essential fish habitats and conservation priority habitats. Focusing on fisheries, a tool for scenario evaluation study rating the costs and benefits of alternative coastal MSP plans and including displacement scenarios has been produced and expanded to include entry points for other sectors than fisheries (i.e. accounting for the dynamics of the aquaculture production and its revenues, the dynamic of windmill parks energy production and the footprint of the shipping lanes). The tool is developed to be able to project the likely income from fisheries form different fishing activities active in different zones and time, and is developed to track the main fisheries economic indicators used to describe national fishing fleet performances of European fleets. In this context DISPLACE now provides scenario-based assessment and projections of the amount of income generated by national fishing fleets (or other finer fleet segments level economics and fishing harbour communities) over months, quarters and years as long as national input data are available. On this issue, important results have been obtained in the Adriatic Sea CS and a paper summarizing such study has been published on Ecosphere journal (Bastardie et al., 2017). The work and scenario testing and reporting have been completed for the Ionian Sea, the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea CSs, the Norwegian Fjords and NE Atlantic Coasts, and finally was not applied for the Tyrrhenian Sea CS where the fisheries is not found to be the main issue in this area. Focusing on aquaculture, several evaluations have been done in order to establish local and regional impacts of organic load and nutrients caused by the feeding material. Two sampling cruises at different stages of the aquaculture production have been carried out in Norway and one sampling cruise respectively in Adriatic Sea, Tyrrhenian Sea, and Black Sea, in order to quantify possible changes in the release of organic and inorganic chemicals and to assess the alterations of the benthic community structure causing possible loss of ecosystem functioning near the selected production site. The spatial distribution of chemicals has been used to track the cumulative-long term (trace elements) versus short term (polyaromatic molecules) impact of the aquaculture in the surrounding environment. Results have been integrated with the biological responses obtained by exposing collected sediments with representative organisms of the microbenthic community. The flux of energy is being monitored, parametrized in terms of characterization and quantification and linked with the recorded mass production. Identifying novel tools to monitor anthropogenic changes is one of the goals of the project. Although conventional parameters documenting environmental impact are informative, early results show that a direct measure of sediment organic matter reactivity represents a superior discriminator of fish-farm derived organic matter.

The main output produced in different case studies was related to producing maps that visualize the spatial extent of each anthropic activity, mainly represented by fishing activities, aquaculture activities and other activities, such as related to energy industries (oil and gas), commercial shipping routes etc. The same tool produced for each case study was a matrix of interactions, which allowed the users to identify the conflicts and synergies among all activities. In addition, maps of conflicts and cumulative conflict scores were produced in order to better understand and analyze the distribution and intensity of interactions between anthropic activities, especially related to fishing, aquaculture and other human activities in different marine areas.

ECOAST aims to identify, develop and test new methodologies for spatial and temporal management of fisheries and aquaculture in coastal areas. The overall approach will assess the impact of fisheries and aquaculture on coastal ecosystems, including essential fish habitats and conservation priority habitats, as well as synergies and conflicts between human activities. Building on previous methodologies and experiences the project will evaluate marine spatial planning in seven coastal case study areas having different ecological and socio-economic characteristics: 1) Adriatic Sea (ADR), 2) Ionian Sea (ION), 3) Black Sea (BLK), 4) Tyrrhenian Sea (TYR), 5) Baltic Sea (BAL), 6) Norwegian Fjords (NOR) and 7) NE Atlantic Coasts (ATL). The project outcomes will produce case specific evaluation of the ecological footprints of aquaculture and fisheries in coastal areas, maps of optimal areas for fisheries and aquaculture, evaluation of compatibility between fisheries, aquaculture and other human activities in coastal areas, as well as implementation of holistic methods and an operational modelling framework to evaluate and predict stakeholder responses to coastal spatial management options covering marine cross sector occupation of space. Several methodologies already exist to assess the impacts on the ecosystem and the socio-economic effects of some spatial management measures, as well as to spatially manage some cross sector marine activities, but none of them integrate all relevant management aspects for coastal areas. Therefore, the holistic methodology will cover in a single system different approaches and management aspects, identifying realistic spatial and temporal potentials and limitations for the integration of fisheries and aquaculture in coastal areas, in order to allow policy makers and stakeholders to evaluate management measures from different points of view and share decisions in a transparent manner on case specific basis.