Presenting the Sustainable index to sea urchin fishing in Galicia

Last Wednesday, a conference was organised at the Federación Galega de Cofradía de Pescadores to deepen the knowledge of sea urchin fishing. That day, the OURIXEN project led by the University of Santiago de Compostela and the SOST-Erizo project of FOL-CIM of the University of Vigo were presented. Both projects are funded by the REDEMAR programme of the XUNTA-Conselleria do Mar, which aims to bring together the scientific community and the fishing sector to work on issues of concern to the sector. The OURIXEN project aims to understand the genetic diversity of sea urchin populations in Galicia in order to improve the process of sowing the resource when necessary.

On the other hand, the FOL team together with its scientific collaborators, Centro de Investigaciones Marinas (CIMA) form Conselleria do Mar, and Mareira Bizi presented the SOST-Erizo project and its results. The sustainability index created within the framework of the project was presented to the attendees, fishermen from all the fishermen’s associations in Galicia. They were also able to listen to the testimonies of the fishermen from the participating fishermen’s associations about their active participation in the project.

The sustainability index allows to recognise the indicators that positively and negatively affect the sustainability value in order to take measures to improve the sustainability index in the next fishing season to achieve long-term sustainability of the resource. One of the objectives of the project was to build a web tool that would allow the cofradias to automatically calculate their sustainability index, however, the tight timeframe of the project, finally two months, made it impossible to create such an automated application. However, we hope to continue working to provide as soon as possible this tool to the sector, which can be very useful to improve the internal management of the sea urchin fishery.
We would like to thank the support of the Federation in the development of the project as well as in the organisation of this conference, the XUNTA-Conselleria de Mar for the financing of the project through the REDEMAR network, the cofradias of Lira and Baiona for their active participation and involvement in the project that made possible the creation of the index, and all those attending the event for their interest. We hope to work together soon to transfer these results.
You can read the DUVI news about this event here.