Working Group on Integrated Assessments of the Norwegian Sea (WGINOR; outputs from 2024 meeting)

<p dir="ltr">The ICES Working Group on integrated assessments for the Norwegian Sea (WGINOR) synthesizes and evaluates information on physical, chemical, ecological, human, and environmental processes affecting the Norwegian Sea ecosystem. For this purpose, it gathers information, performs data analyses, and interacts with stakeholders. Based on these, WGINOR develops and produces an annual ecosystem status summary and assembles a knowledge base that supports the Norwegian Sea Ecosystem Overview.</p><p dir="ltr">In 2024, WGINOR updated the integrated ecosystem assessment of the Norwegian Sea and reports that 1) the positive trend in relative freshwater content has stopped and the volume of Arctic Water is still high but warmer and less dense, 2) the annual primary production do not display noticeable trend, but the seasonal timing of peak production is gradually shifting to a later date, 3) zooplankton spring biomass declined in the mid-2000s and since then there has been no clear trend but variations between years, 4) spawning stock biomass of herring and mackerel continued to decline in 2023 whereas the blue whiting stock in increased due to historically high recruitment of two year classes, 5) the long-term decrease in breeding numbers for Atlantic puffin continues while the downward trend for black-legged kittiwake has apparently levelled off after 2015. Common guillemot numbers are still low but have increased markedly over the last decade, 6) abundance indicators for main seal species suggest declining numbers or are highly uncertain. Levels of harbour porpoise bycatch are of concern but have like been reduced in recent years. The spatial distribution of baleen whales has gradually shifted away from the Norwegian Sea into adjacent areas. Minke whale abundance is estimated to have increased considerably in the last years.</p><p dir="ltr">In 2024, WGINOR pursued methodological work to improve the workflow, transparency, and replicability of the analyses performed by the working group. This includes standards for data series selection, meta data reporting, automatized data processing workflows to analyse trends and recent changes in multiple ecosystem components and archiving of data and computer code on the ICES/WGINOR GitHub. WGINOR has also pursued ecosystem modelling work to support data-informed food web assessment, multi-species management strategy evaluation, causal understanding and quantification of climate-fish-fisheries relationships, and scenario explorations.</p><p dir="ltr">In 2024, WGINOR invited stakeholders from the pelagic fishery in Iceland to a meeting to discuss topics they consider relevant to integrated ecosystem assessment of the Norwegian Sea and preliminary results of Marine SABRES, an international research project in which they participate. Stakeholder participation during the meeting greatly improved compared to the last meeting in 2021. This improvement resulted from in-person attendance, a focus on presentations by stakeholders, the use of native language, and a higher number of stakeholders than scientists attending. However, it remains challenging to convince stakeholders to attend the meeting.</p>