Small pelagic fish sampling programme 2018/19 - Fisheries Science Partnership

This Fisheries Science Partnership (FSP) project was a collaboration between industry and scientists, responding to the need for data from the main small pelagic fisheries in the South West coast of England. It had three primary objectives: i) to collaborate, improve and continue the self‐sampling time‐series of biological data collected on sardine from commercial catches in support of the stock assessment; ii) to engage the Lyme Bay fishermen in a self‐sampling programme to collect biological data on sprat needed for the stock assessment and iii) to run an industry‐based acoustic survey in parallel with the existing scientific PELTIC survey to involve industry in the process of collecting fisheries independent data and to investigate several queries from industry about the validity of the Cefas PELTIC survey (effects of timing and lack of shallow water coverage on biomass estimate).