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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.

This Responsible Sourcing Guide to monkfish contains information on sustainability issues, stock assessment, conservation measures and management worldwide for the individual stocks of this species updated to 2013. There is a short section on the product characteristics of the species. The information was obtained from scientific, industry and governmental sources and appropriate references are given.

This note aims to help readers to better understand what’s happening in the UK fishing industry. This is to reassure buyers that UK-caught fish can, and should, be a component of the supply chain.The various sections describe the modern catching sector, explain how the industry is coming to terms with new responsibilities and shows how it’s playing its part in the stewardship of the marine environment.

This report reviews ecosystem risk assessment methods and describes in detail the method evolved in Australia by CSIRO.