Claude Merrien’s research while affiliated with French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea and other places

Since 2000, Ifremer has been implemented a Fisheries Information System (FIS), in strong collaboration with the DPMA (Direction of fisheries and aquaculture of the French Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries). The FIS aims at building an operational and multidisciplinary monitoring network for scientific purposes, allowing a comprehensive view of fishery systems including their biological, technical, environmental and economical components. The objectives of the FIS are (i) to provide the specifications and methodologies for the collection, storage and processing of fisheries data, with the constant concern to harmonise all these procedures on a national scale, (ii) to improve data management system and access to data for a widespread public, and (iii) to produce and distribute relevant datasets, indicators and synthesis, for understanding and evaluation, including bio-economic diagnostics of the fisheries, and assessment of the short and long-term impacts of fisheries management scenario and measures. The FIS covers all the French fisheries, including overseas territories and small-scale fisheries, for which data are often hardly available or missing, whereas two thirds of the French vessels are less than 12 meters long. The challenge was to establish a statistical and an integrated approach supporting bio-ecological and economic issues. To further an integrated analysis of the fishery systems, the wide range kinds of data-including acoustic surveys, biological in-situ observations, environmental observations, as well as fishing statistics (landings and efforts) or economic data-are managed in a single data management system, based on an integrated relational data base with geographical facilities.

DRAFT Abstract: The development on the ecosystem-based approach to fisheries implies to improve integrated analysis of fisheries by considering the biological as well as the socioeconomic dimensions of the exploitation and thus, an improvement in the knowledge of fleets structure, evolution and activity. Since 2000, Ifremer has been implemented a Fisheries Information System (FIS), a multidisciplinary monitoring network allowing an integrated and comprehensive view of fishery systems including biological, technical, environmental and economical components. The FIS covers all the French fisheries, including the so-often neglected small-scale fisheries. One of the originalities of the FIS lies in the fleet monitoring procedure: a comprehensive collection of annual activity calendars aiming at characterizing the inactivity or activity of the vessels each month of the year and, in the latter case, the métiers practised (use of a gear to target one or several species) and the main fishing areas. This survey covers all the French fishing fleets and provides minimum but exhaustive information on the vessels. It is particularly instructive for the small-scale fisheries, where catches and effort data are often incomplete. Furthermore, this exhaustive data allows stratifying the fleet in fleets (typologies) and thus provides the basis (i) for the implementation of sampling schemes to estimate catches, landings, discards or economic performance of the different fleets and (ii) for the development of a fleet-métier matrix giving the possibility of identifying at the time, the structure of the whole fleet in fleets, the métier polyvalence of the vessels and the allocation of fishing effort on the different exploited fishing resources.