Interim Report of the ICES/HELCOM Working Group on Integrated Assessments of the Baltic Sea (WGIAB)

The ICES/HELCOM Working Group on Integrated Assessments of the Baltic Sea (WGIAB) meeting was held in Lisbon (Portugal) 24–28 April 2017, back-to-back with the ICES Working Group on Ecosystem Assessment of Western European Shelf Seas (WGEAWESS) and the ICES Working Group on Comparative Analyses between Euro-pean Atlantic and Mediterranean marine ecosystems to move towards an Ecosystem-based Approach to Fisheries (WGCOMEDA). 31 participants from 7 countries attended this meeting, which was chaired by Laura Uusitalo, Finland, Saskia Otto, Germany, Martin Lindegren, Denmark, and Lena Bergström, Sweden.This was the second year of the new three-year Terms of Reference (ToR) for WGIAB. The main working activities in 2017 were to i) continue with the trait-based integrated trend analysis across multiple trophic levels and scope the possibility to extend the spatial range to cover multiple basins, to ii) explore new statistical tools to analyse spa-tio-temporal dynamics, and to iii) continue developing conceptual models that inte-grate the social dimension. All these activities were partly carried out together with WGCOMEDA and WGEAWESS through plenary sessions and three smaller group in-tegration sessions.The study on changes in the Baltic Sea ecosystems and functional traits composition in relation to external drivers is expected to feed into the development of methods to as-sess the environmental status of foodwebs, and to ecosystem-based advice for fisheries management. The work to develop integrated assessments of social-ecological systems is anticipated to feed into integrated management towards the objectives of the com-mon fisheries policy and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD).