indiSeas
An Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries (EAF) has been adopted globally. To make progress towards implementing the EAF, the scientific community is challenged to provide a generic set of integrated indicators to accurately reflect the effects of fisheries on marine ecosystems, to discriminate these effects from other ecosystem drivers and to facilitate effective communication of these effects to managers, policymakers and the public.
The IndiSeas working group was established in 2005 under the auspices of the EUR-OCEANS European Network of Excellence and is co-funded by MEECE. In conjunction with WP5 of MEECE project, the IndiSeas WG aims at "Evaluating the status of marine ecosystems in a changing world”, using a set of different types of indicators to reflect the effects of multiple drivers on the states and trends of marine exploited ecosystems. The first phase of the WG has been finalized in 2010 with the publication of a suite of papers in ICES Journal of Marine Science (volume 67) . It focused on the effects of fishing of the health of world's marine ecosystems and made use of ecological and biodiversity indicators. The second phase starts this year with inclusion of climate and socio-economic indicators. In addition, the selection of indicators will be reviewed and potentially revised in the light of the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive (WP5).
The IndiSeas WG relies strongly on a multi-institutional collaboration, which allows sharing of scientific data, and above all, allows basing the scientific diagnoses on local expertise in each ecosystem investigated. Therefore, the global comparative approach keeps a good track of the data which underlie the indicators, and the local scientific knowledge on the functioning of ecosystems is accounted for in the final diagnosis. The first phase of the WG (2005-2008) assembled the expertise of 31 scientific experts around the world (19 countries, 21 research institutes).
Deliverable 6.3 Report on the IndiSeas project as of August 2010.
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