AbstractsBiology & Animal Science

Since ancient times, fishing has been a major source of food for humanity and a provider of employment and economic benefits to those engaged in this activity. However, with increased knowledge and the dynamic development of fisheries it was realized that aquatic resources, although renewable, were not infinite and needed to be properly managed if their contribution to the nutritional, economic and social well-being of the growing world's population was to be sustained. In recent years, world fisheries have become a dynamically developing sector of the food industry, and coastal states have striven to take advantage of their new opportunities by investing in modern fishing fleets and processing factories in response to growing international demand for fish and fishery products. It became clear, however, that many fishery resources could not sustain an often uncontrolled increase in exploitation. Concerns have been expressed about the contribution of fisheries to sustainable development and about overfishing, excess catching capacity, the depletion of some stocks, human-induced changes in ecosystems, as well as the increase and globalization of the fish trade with its potential impact on local supplies and equity. In order to address these problems, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has called for the application of an Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management (EAFM), which aims to achieve a sustainable exploitation of commercial fisheries, providing specific consideration of the interactions between fishing gears and marine ecosystems. EAFM takes into account that fisheries are embedded into the environment and cannot be managed in isolation. It has to be considered as the application of sustainable development principles to the fishing sector, combining ecological sustainability, economic viability and social fairness. Nevertheless, while it is widely recognized that fishing is important to sustainable development and that its contribution could be improved, the amount of objective scientific information about fishing is limited and what exists is difficult to access. The reliability of scientific advice for the management of natural resources is highly dependent on the quantity and quality of data that are available for scientific assessment and interpretation. Although large amounts of certain types of data about marine ecosystems are readily available, as in the case of satellite-derived remote sensing data or observations based on automatic telemetry, it is far more common to have to deal with limited and irregularly spaced data (e.g. on fish and other marine fauna), and the data may not always be strictly comparable due to variations in environmental conditions between sampling periods. The main reason is that in fishery research the collection of data is both time-consuming and expensive. Data are difficult to obtain, and the problems increase when the goal of the research is to study long time series on a macro-scale, with the purpose of examining changes in the dynamics of a whole…