Report of the ICES ACOM/SCICOM Workshop on Ecosystem Overviews (WKECOVER)

The joint SCICOM-ACOM workshop on ecosystem overviews (WKECOVER) met at ICES HQ in Copenhagen from 7-11 January 2013. The workshop group comprised 21 participants from 10 countries.The workshop defined four purposes of the ecosystem overview in the ICES advice: (1) to describe the location, scale, management and assessment boundaries of the eco-region; (2) to alert expert groups to situations within the environment and ecosystems that are expected to significantly influence their advice; (3) to describe the distribu-tion of human activity and resultant pressure (in space and time) on the environment and ecosystem; and (4) to describe the state of the ecosystem (in space and time) and to comment on pressures accounting for changes in state. The participants agreed that the structure should reflect these purposes, and proposed that the overview comprised four sections to be titled (1) ‘Ecoregion description’; (2) ‘Key signals within the environment and ecosystem’; (3) ‘Activity and pressure’ and (4) ‘State’.