The Working Group on Ballast and Other Ship Vectors under the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, and Inter-national Maritime Organization (ICES/IOC/IMO WGBOSV) aims to provide scientific support to international decision-making to reduce the risk of spread and establishment of non-native spe-cies via maritime transport. The work contributes to ICES Strategic Plan by improving under-standing between anthropogenic activities and marine ecosystems. This report outlines the achievements during 2022–2024. The work of the group consisted of reporting on national ac-tions; collaborative research, and management actions on shipping vectors; as well as advancing the use of novel monitoring approaches and studying species dispersal mechanisms associated with maritime transport.
Concerning ballast water, several members of the group collated a dataset of treated ballast wa-ter samples from ships and published a peer-reviewed article addressing ships’ compliance to the ballast water performance standard of IMO. The study concluded that compliance testing should be increased globally with periodic testing to ensure that ballast water management sys-tems remain operational after commissioning.
The group has provided impartial and evidence-based recommendations to the Marine Environ-ment Protection Committee (MEPC) and Sub-Committee on Pollution Prevention and Response (PPR) of IMO in ballast water and biofouling-related matters. The most significant contribution to IMO included two submissions to the 10th session of PPR in 2023; 1) guidelines for testing ship biofouling in-water cleaning systems to assess the efficacy of these systems, and 2) a commenting paper to provide clarifications and avoid subjective wording in the revised Biofouling Guidelines of IMO.
Several research elements provided new information on tracking the movement of ships poten-tially translocating species between distinct biogeographic regions. This work further high-lighted the importance of relatively pristine areas, such as the Arctic and Antarctic region, and identified biogeographic barriers limiting natural spread of organisms within distinct coastal re-gions. Regarding molecular methods, an important achievement was a workshop following the International Conference on Marine Bioinvasions XI (ICMB XI) 2023, to provide recommenda-tions to the end-users of these tools, which may help monitoring activities to identify newly in-troduced species.