Development of Fishing Gears with Reduced Effects on Environment (DEGREE)

The objective of this application is to fund a PhD student who will work within the DEGREE project, which is recently funded by EU. DEGREE is a project with 11 international partners with the aim of quantifying the physical and biological impact of sub-co mponents of bottom trawls and then to develop and evaluate alternatives that reduce the negative benthic impacts associated with trawling. While demersal trawls have been refined to reduce the by-catch of non-target and undersized commercial fish species, attempts to reduce the benthic by-catch or the potential damage on benthic species has only begun to emerge. The majority of recent research has focused on the impact of the trawl system, i.e. the impact of the doors, sweeps and groundgear combined. Ho wever, in order to identify suitable mitigation measures, in the first instance it is necessary to identify the relative impact of the individual components of the trawl e.g. doors, sweeps and groundgear and, secondly to investigate suitable mitigations m easures for each of these while maintaining catch rates at a commercially acceptable level. A range of biological and physical indicators that are related to changes in benthic habitats and communities will be collected. One of the main challenges facing the project team relates to the ability to observe such impacts in a particularly hostile environment. Problems may arise due to sand clouds obscuring observations; the ability to locate trawl tracks with the ROV and other instrumentation issues associat ed with the close proximity to trawls e.g. strength. The diversity of indicators agreed by the DEGREE project team will help limit the risk of data collection failure. In parallel with these developments the MAFCONS model is to be extended so as to consid er the impact of individual gear components. This will then be used and applied to the Norwegian demersal trawl fleet operating in the Barents Sea as a case study.