Technical Guidelines for assessing fishing impact from mobile bottom-contacting fishing gears

This guidance document presents an overview of the ICES seafloor pressure and impact assessment framework to promote understanding and dissemination of an assessment method that can be applied at the regional scales.

The intended audience for this document is those involved in assessing the seafloor across ICES and EU areas: for example, in relation to the development of ICES Ecosystem Overviews and other ICES advice, national-level implementation and reporting for the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), and the work of regional seas conventions (Baltic Sea, North–East Atlantic, Mediterranean and Black Seas). The document also provides technical background for stakeholders and other users or recipients of assessments based on the ICES seafloor pressure and impact assessment framework.

The document comes together with open-source code and data products to run the assessment (https://github.com/ices-eg/FBIT), following the guiding principles of ICES Transparent Assessment framework (TAF). The assessment framework has been developed through an iterative process of open workshops, and applications of the framework have been peer-reviewed, evaluated by an advice drafting group and approved by ICES Advisory Committee (ACOM) (ICES, 2016, 2017, 2021a, 2024a–c).

This document, as well as the underlying code to run the assessment, will be regularly evaluated during the annual meeting of the ICES Working Group on Fisheries Benthic Impact and Trade-offs (WGFBIT) and updated based on feedback and further developments. The methods described in this version of the document provided the basis of the 2024 advice on “spatial trade-off analysis between reducing the extent of mobile bottom contacting gear (MBCG) disturbance to seabed habitats and potential costs to fisheries” and inclusion of seafloor assessments into the Ecosystem Overviews for the Greater North Sea, Celtic Seas and Baltic Sea ecoregions (e.g. ICES, 2024a–c).