FOL students participate in Fisheries Management course of DO*MAR Program

FOL PhD candidates completed this month the course “Evaluation and Management of Fishery and Shellfish Resources” launched by the DO*MAR doctoral program at the University of Vigo. The course was coordinated by the UVigo researchers Gonzalo Macho and Elsa Vázquez, and counted with the participation of academics from Portugal Karim Erzini and Paulo Vasconcelos, and fisheries biologists of the Galician Regional Government Luis Rodríguez and Fernando Febrero. The course covered an overview of European small scale fisheries, with a special emphasis on Portuguese and Galician shellfisheries. Following the lectures the PhD students worked on a scientific report in which they integrated a case study with the key theoretical aspects of fisheries management learned.

Alba, Iratxe, and Diego applied the concepts learned to their ongoing thesis work. Alba highlighted in her report the importance of stock assessments for sustainable fisheries and advocated for Galician fishery-independent surveys of the resource she studies, the goose barnacle. She proposed a collaborative fisheries monitoring program and analyzed the  assessment protocol proposed by Parada et al. (2012). Iratxe’s worked on fish transshipments in the high seas and their implications in IUU fishing and seafood traceability, a topic of great concern for the EU fishing countries. She proposed establishing a monitoring program to assess transshipment in the high seas in the context of tuna and tuna-like species of the Atlantic Ocean. Diego designed a diagnostic framework to prioritize actions for small-scale fisheries management. The diagnostic framework is built on a multi-participatory process and a compilation of knowledge from empirical experiences in which time, data, and capital, be it human, social, and/or economic, are limited and management plans and actions are urgently needed.