Total marine fisheries extractions by country in the Baltic Sea

Total marine fisheries extractions by country in the Baltic Sea: 1950-present, Rossing, Booth and Zeller 225
SWEDEN’S FISHERIES CATCHES IN THE BALTIC SEA (1950-2007) 1
LO PERSSON
Sveriges Lantbruksuniversitet
Umeå, Sweden
Current address:
Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia,
2202 Main Mall, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 1Z4, Canada
l.persson@fisheries.ubc.ca
ABSTRACT
A catch data reconstruction for Swedish fisheries in the Baltic Sea, from 1950-2007, was undertaken,
which estimated IUU catches, including unreported landings, discards, and recreational catches. These
IUU catch estimates were added to a reported data foundation based on the officially reported landings as
presented by the International Council for Exploration of the Sea (ICES) on behalf of the Swedish
government. The total estimated reconstructed Swedish catch in the Baltic Sea for the 1950-2007 time
period was 31% larger than the officially reported landings, and peaked in 1998 at 390,000 t. The total
estimated IUU catch consisted of 1.09 million t unreported landings, 0.52 million t discards, and 0.63
million t of recreational catches.
INTRODUCTION
Fisheries have a heavy impact on processes within marine ecosystems. The extraction of fish has a direct
impact through the removal of biomass, and indirectly affects the ecosystem by altering conditions within
the food web (Botsford et al., 1997; Pauly et al., 2000). Thus, in order to foster a better understanding and
foundation for ecosystem-based resource management, knowledge of total fisheries removals is important.
There are several components of fisheries catch that are often not recorded, but affect fish mortality rates.
Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU; Bray, 2000) catches, including discards, unreported landings
and recreational catches all contribute to the under-estimation of catches. The Sea Around Us Project at
the Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia (www.seaaroundus.org), has developed a method for
catch reconstruction which aims to account for IUU catches through estimation approaches (e.g., Zeller et
al., 2007; Zeller and Pauly, 2007). Depending on the data and knowledge available, more or less of the
estimation has to be based on interpolations between assumption-, and information-based ‗anchor points‘
(Zeller et al., 2006). To justify the uncertainty around such estimates, one has to consider the alternative
which usually implies an interpretation of zero catch when no reported data are available (Zeller et al.
2006). In statistical terminology the assumption that all IUU components are zero is ‗precise‘ but not
‗accurate‘. In contrast, a clearly described method developed to fill in knowledge gaps using anchor points,
and assumption-based approaches can be used to construct a conservative estimate of such IUU
components, which is more ‗accurate‘ (i.e., closer to the true value), although possibly less statistically
‗precise‘, than zero.
In the Baltic Sea, the annual reported landings of cod declined in the beginning of the 1990s after a
previous tenfold increase since the 1930s (Thulin and Andrushaitis, 2003). For many years, the European
Union (EU) has set quotas higher than the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) has
recommended (Lövin, 2007). ICES recommendations are based on formal stock assessments which
endeavor to keep exploited population sizes within safe biological limits. Since 1993, ICES includes an
estimate of unallocated catches (here assumed to represent unreported landings), plus discards, to the
number they base their recommendation on (ICES, 2007a). The estimates are based on numbers that
1 Cite as: Persson, L. (2010) Sweden‘s fisheries catches in the Baltic Sea (1950 – 2007). pp. 225-263. In: Rossing, P., Booth, S. and
Zeller, D. (eds.) Total marine fisheries extractions by country in the Baltic Sea: 1950-present. Fisheries Centre Research Reports 18
(1). Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia, Canada [ISSN 1198-6727].