Tag Archives: Michel J. Kaiser

The Impacts of Trawling in the North Sea are Overrated

CFOODA new study by Ferdinand Oberle, Curt Storlazzi, and Till Hanebuth attempted to quantify the global impact of bottom trawling on continental shelf. It presents a high-resolution, one-year, spatial record of ground-penetrating fishing activities, namely otter trawling (referred to as bottom-trawling in the paper) on the NW-Iberian shelf, and calculates the resuspended sediment load caused by the operations of this fleet. The authors also challenge conclusions from papers like Kaiser et al 2006 that suggest trawling affected seabed hotspots are rare. To this end the authors found NW Iberian shelf areas to be experiencing trawling on average 5.9 times per annum compared to less than 1 in previous studies.  Read the rest here 21:18

Do “Catch Reconstructions” really Implicate Overfishing?

CFOODA new paper led by Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia that found global catch data, as reported to the FAO, to be significantly lower than the true catch numbers. “Global fish catches are falling three times faster than official UN figures suggest, according to a landmark new study, with overfishing to blame.” 400 researches spent the last decade accumulating missing global catch data from small-scale fisheries, sport fisheries, illegal fishing activity and fish discarded at sea, which FAO statistics, “rarely include.” –  Comment by Michel J. Kaiser, Bangor University – Comment by David Agnew, Director of Standards MSC  Read the post here 11:31