5-6 October 2017, Kochi, Kerala, India —GIZ (Indo-German Biodiversity Programme) and Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI), in coordination with Q-quatics, organized and conducted the training-workshop on “The use of CMSY tool for assessment of Indian fish stocks in a data-poor environment”.
During the course, experts introduced and trained Indian fisheries scientists on a mechanism that resolves data deficiency when assessing marine fish stocks in Indian waters, a new method which allows the assessment of fish stocks in data-poor environment by using time series of catch data and estimates of resilience which can be derived from FishBase.
Resource persons were Dr. Rainer Froese (Geomar Helmholtz-Zentrum für Ozeanforschung Kiel, Germany), Dr. Maria Lourdes Palomares (Sea Around Us, University of British Columbia, Canada), Ms. Crispina Binohlan (FishBase, Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines), and Dr. Jan Michael Vakily (CMPA Team Leader, GIZ). It was participated by 18 staff of CMFRI, 2 from the Department of Fisheries – Bangladesh, and 2 also from Bay of Bengal Program -IGO, Chennai. The list of participants is available at https://goo.gl/JRZf9R.
Click here to see media uptake in India (The Hindu: Ways to estimate yield in Indian waters proposed).
Organizers and participants of the CMSY Workshop in Kochi, India.
The method called CMSY (Catch and Maximum Sustainable Yields) was developed at the GEOMAR Helmholtz-Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel (Germany) by Dr. Rainer Froese and a group of international colleagues. It uses Monte-Carlo methods and advanced statistics to combine existing knowledge about the resilience of a species and the history of its fishery with the time series of catches to estimate the catch that the stock can support at its current size. The method was successfully applied by fisheries officers at a workshop in the Philippines in January this year. It was then used to do a first comprehensive analysis of all (397) exploited stocks in European waters. Now it has been taken up by the “Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit” (GIZ) and used in a workshop of 22 fisheries officers from India and Bangladesh to assess a number of data-poor stocks from the region.
“For 25 years we have collected life history traits of fishes [in FishBase], it was about time to put this knowledge to good use in fisheries management”, says Rainer Froese, lead author of the study.
The detailed description of the method:
Froese, R., Demirel, N., Gianpaolo, C., Kleisner, K.M., Winker, H. 2016. Estimating fisheries reference points from catch and resilience. Fish and Fisheries, doi:10.1111/faf.12190. PDF User Guide, Code & Data
Application to 397 European stocks:
Froese, R., Garilao, C., Winker, H., Coro, G., Demirel, N., Tsikliras, A., Dimarchopoulou, D., Scarcella, G., Sampang-Reyes, A. 2016. Exploitation and status of European stocks. World Wide Web electronic publication, http://oceanrep.geomar.de/
Click here here to download the software, user-guide and sample data for free.
