Working Group on Fisheries Acoustics, Science and Technology (WGFAST)

The WGFAST meeting in 2023 was a mid-day business meeting, following the ICES Fisheries and Plankton Acoustics Symposium: “From Echosounder to the cloud. Transforming Acoustic Data to Information” which brought together 150 participants from 26 countries. The Symposium was organized around four theme sessions: Organism Detection: Models, Measures, and Classification; Advancements in Acoustic Devices, Platforms, and Combined Technologies; Data Integration: Analytics; and Data Integration: Application to Ecosystem, Conservation, and Society. Use of various autonomous platforms and machine learning appear in large expansion, large-scale ecosystem studies are well represented, and scattering modelling is still very much in evidence. The impact of acquisition parameters or sampling strategies on the quality of results is still being studied. Three keynote speakers were invited, who provided their view about: 1/the boom of offshore wind development in the United States and its potential impact on fisheries and the ecosystem; 2/the ecosystem approach to living marine resource management; 3/the effects of climate change and fishing on the ecosystem and the human dimension of managing fisheries. They provided guidance on what information is needed to manage ecosystems for resource utilization or other societal needs of aquatic environments where advanced technologies can provide information.

The WGFAST meeting itself focused on updates on data and metadata conventions, on shared processing and modelling open tools. Several needs were highlighted: consistency of underwater-acoustics terminology used by the WGFAST community with international standards; to agree on a methodology for evaluating Sound Exposure Level (SEL) for marine mammals, aiming at quantify and mitigate risk for animals; to have a review of fisheries acoustics training courses. The development of large-scale studies leads to encouragement to fill in spatial and temporal coverage of high seas acoustics databases worldwide.