The EU project SEAwise (https://seawiseproject.org/) endeavours to enhance existing multi-stock multi-species Management Strategy Evaluation (MSE) models so that they can be used to define and evaluate fisheries management strategies that address broad Ecosystem-Based Fish-eries Management (EBFM) objectives, including in particular identifying Harvest Control Rules (HCRs) that are robust to changes in productivity.
The WKEcoMSE workshop was held to: (1) benchmark the approaches used or developed in the project to develop robust and consistent environment-productivity relationships for commercial stocks across selected case studies and integrate them in MSE models used by the SEAwise pro-ject and by ICES; (2) to provide context for those approaches within the general field of “envi-ronment-enriched” MSEs; and (3) to draw from the participants collective experience some gen-eral guidelines about the integration of environmental impacts on stock productivity in MSE tools.
23 presentations were given, both about the work carried out within SEAwise but also by inter-national colleagues working toward similar objectives, and various topics were discussed over eight sessions designed to accommodate participants spread across Europe and Northern Amer-ica. “Good practices” to incorporate environmental considerations in MSE modelling were then drafted collectively and have been summarized in the panels below. These rely on the experi-ences of the WKEcoMSE participants and are not exhaustive.