Dossier
Understanding fish stock developments – scientific basis for sustainable use
Christoph Stransky, Uwe Krumme, Jörn Scharsack
To sustainably use marine fish stocks, we have to know the present stock status and need to predict stock development in the near future. We use our long-term monitoring programmes to provide the essential scientific basis for a sustainable exploitation of our fisheries resources.
We run extensive monitoring programmes at sea using research vessels and analysing catches from German commercial fishing vessels, while all countries sharing the same resource also collect data from their vessels and catches. Thus, we produce unique time series on the development of the fish stocks in the Baltic, North Sea and North Atlantic. The data are stored in large data bases and are used to feed the fish stock assessments of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) and other international scientific organisations.
Together with our international partners, we use these data to develop recommendations for the sustainable management of living marine resources that are shared across nations and managed jointly, primarily by setting total allowable catches (TACs) for those stocks.
