Technical Guidelines - ICES fisheries overviews

Fisheries overviews are central products in ICES approach to support ecosystem-based management (EBM), the primary way of managing human activities affecting marine ecosystems. The overviews have been established, taking into account feedback from both the recipients of ICES advice and its stakeholders. They are synthetic products that provide the ’fisheries narrative’ for each ecoregion and thereby, together with ecosystem and aquaculture overviews, set the broader ecosystem context for other, usually more focused ICES advice products. The fisheries overviews are based on information provided by expert groups and use automated data products and GIS layers from accepted legitimate sources. The overviews are finalized in an advice drafting group and approved by ICES Advisory Committee. The fisheries overviews are included in a number of cooperative agreements that ICES has with national agencies and international organizations and commissions; they also reach the wider scientific community, including ICES network. Given this broad audience, the overviews evolve through both top-down processes (advisory requests and decisions about strategic direction) and bottom-up processes (information streams that highlight new science products from ICES network).