Status of non-assessed fish species in Irish waters

Abstract

This report gives the latest assessment results for abundance of several fish species not otherwise assessed by international bodies or national agencies within Ireland. The assess-ment was performed to support Ireland’s obligations under the EU’s Marine Strategy Frame-work Directive (MSFD) to assess the state of commercial and non-commercial fish stocks. The commercially important stocks included in this assessment are recorded as being caught in Irish MSFD waters, from ICES FISHSTAT database, and for which sufficient trawl survey data are available to assess them. The non-commercial fish species included in this assess-ment are those present in the Irish MSFD area, which are either listed as being of conserva-tion concern under the EU’s data collection programme for fisheries, those on the OSPAR list of threatened species, elasmobranch species prohibited from being caught in commercial fisheries under the EU CFP legislation and/or those listed as endangered with extinction on the EU fish red list. The evaluation of the status of commercial and non-commercial species in the subareas VI and VII of FAO fishing area 27 was carried out using data from research vessels surveys. Data since 1998 were used and results show that only 4 of 10 commercial stocks were above the Good Environmental Status (GES) threshold value. The results of this work were then used to populate an overall assessment of GES for MSFD Descriptors D1 and D3 by Ireland in 2019.