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Our Annual Plan is taken from our 2015-18 Corporate Plan and details the programmes of work we will deliver in 2016/17 . The Plan sets out the costs associated with our work programmes as well as our Key Performance Indicators for the year.

This study (SIPF Project D123) looks at the merits of the various tools and systems used elsewhere to manage sectors involved with Brown Crab fisheries, such as; access restrictions, pot limitations, shellfish licences and permits, quotas and TACs, Minimum Landing Sizes and gear technology, and considers their utility in managing Brown Crab stocks in UK and Ireland.

Our Annual Plan is taken from our 2015-18 Corporate Plan and details the programmes of work we will deliver in 2017/18 . The Plan sets out the costs associated with our work programmes as well as our Key Performance Indicators for the year.

The study covered fisheries from northwest Norway through the North Sea, English Channel/la Manche, Cantabrian Sea and Algarve to the French Mediterranean. It was carried out as a series of tasks. Task 1, preparation, involved reviewing each partner’s national fisheries and establishing liaison groups of fishermen and other industry members; Task 2, quantifying lost gear, required the partners to interview fishermen to establish their experiences of gear loss and then the survey the areas where losses were reported; Task 3, physical evolution, started with the retrieval of ‘naturally lost’ gears and then moved on to a series of exercises simulating gear loss and monitoring how the ‘lost’ gears changed over time; Task 4, ecosystem impacts, involved interpreting catch data from the experimental gears, raising the data to métier level and comparing the results to targeted commercial catches; Task 5, mitigating measures, established a sub-group to look at the ways in which gear loss is treated elsewhere, matched those approaches to the European fisheries and assessed the likely benefits of alternate strategies; Task 6, ran throughout the project and involved industry liaison, reporting and other dissemination. The work required a relatively high level of industry liaison. In practical terms this meant that each national partner set up a national advisory group (NAG) to guide the work and to ensure that the sea trials and recommendations were representative and realistic. The NAGs were mainly made up of experienced skippers but also included net riggers and other professionals as appropriate. This report, wherever possible, follows the sequence of tasks described above.