Report of the Working Group on Nephrops Surveys (WGNEPS)

The Working Group on Nephrops Surveys (WGNEPS), until 2012 known as SGNEPS, is the international coordination expert group for Nephrops Underwater Television (UWTV) and trawl surveys within ICES areas and in a preliminary and exploratory way in some Geographical subareas (GSA) in the Mediter-ranean and has a quality assurance and development role.In the current 3-year period (2016-2018), an ICES Cooperative Research Report #340 on “Using under-water television surveys to assess and advise on Nephrops stocks” has been published, and a draft ver-sion of the manual for Nephrops Underwater TV Surveys for inclusion in the Series of ICES Survey Pro-tocols (SISP) has been completed.Updates of 20 Nephrops UWTV and 3 Nephrops trawl surveys conducted by 12 different countries (Cro-atia, Denmark, France, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, UK England, UK Northern Ire-land, UK Scotland) covering in total 23 Nephrops functional units were presented and reviewed annually during the WGNEPS meetings. Coordination between surveys across countries and laboratories in par-ticular in respect to Nephrops burrow identification and the application of new technologies for record-ing and analysing video footages were carried out at the annual meetings and during two separate workshops in 2017 and in 2018. The working group evaluated whether the interpretation of UWTV survey results could be improved by examining experimental and fieldwork on Nephrops behaviour and burrow emergence and similar species in waters that are not regularly covered by the surveys co-ordinated by WGNEPS (e.g. Greece and New Zealand). R-scripts for checking data quality and presen-tation of survey results have been developed and distributed among the WG members. Additionally, protocols for reporting survey results have been adopted for further standardization and the structure and requirements for a database holding the UWTV survey data have been defined. This allows WGNEPS to ensure data quality as well as to endorse proposed changes to the design of the Nephrops UWTV and trawl surveys.