Lyme Bay Reserve Fully Documented Fishery Trial Lyme Bay Fully Documented Fisheries Trial Jess Woo (Spindrift Marine) Tom Rossiter (Succorfish) Dr Andy Woolmer (Salacia Marine) Lyme Bay Reserve Fully Documented Fishery Trial Acknowledgements The authors, on behalf of the Lyme Bay Reserve Working Group, would like to thank the fishermen on the Lyme Bay ports Beer, Axmouth, Lyme Regis and West Bay for their support and participation without which this important project would not have been a success. The project development and delivery relied heavily on the expertise and insight of the members of the Working Group and subsequently the project Steering Group which should be acknowledged. This project was funded under Axis 3 of the European Fisheries Fund and administered by Blue Marine Foundation. Lyme Bay Reserve Fully Documented Fishery Trial Table of Contents Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................... 2 Table of Contents .............................................................................................................................. 3 Executive Summary ........................................................................................................................... 5 Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 9 Context.......................................................................................................................................... 9 Fully Documented Fishery – the Lyme Bay Model .......................................................................... 9 Catch and Discard Data .............................................................................................................. 9 Spatial Activity Data ................................................................................................................. 10 The Fully Documented Fishery Project – Approach and Objectives............................................... 10 The Steering Group .................................................................................................................. 12 The Equipment ........................................................................................................................ 12 Additional Data and Uses ......................................................................................................... 14 Data Ownership ....................................................................................................................... 15 Outputs: Data analysis and outcomes .............................................................................................. 17 Approach and Methodology ........................................................................................................ 20 Data and Data Handling ........................................................................................................... 20 Creating Heat maps from Vector and Raster Data .................................................................... 20 Fishing Intensity Footprint and Patterns ...................................................................................... 24 Context and Background .......................................................................................................... 24 Approach and methods............................................................................................................ 25 Results ..................................................................................................................................... 26 Discussion ................................................................................................................................ 36 Risk maps for habitat management ............................................................................................. 43 Context and Background .......................................................................................................... 43 Approach and Methods ........................................................................................................... 44 A step by step of the final methodology: .................................................................................. 45 Fishing Intensity/Habitat Outputs ............................................................................................ 46 Habitats/Fishing Activity Discussion ......................................................................................... 53 Requirement: Risk maps for sensitive sessile species management .............................................. 57 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 57 Method ................................................................................................................................... 57 Lyme Bay Reserve Fully Documented Fishery Trial Results ..................................................................................................................................... 58 Discussion ................................................................................................................................ 61 Requirement: Risk maps for mobile species management ........................................................... 63 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 63 Approach and Methods ........................................................................................................... 64 Results ..................................................................................................................................... 65 Discussion ................................................................................................................................ 67 Next steps, considerations and further analyses ...................................................................... 67 Analysis of seasonal/spatial fishing effort as it relates to environmental factors .......................... 69 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 69 Approach and Methods ........................................................................................................... 70 Fishing Activity/Environmental Factors Outputs ....................................................................... 71 Fishing Activity/Environmental Factors Discussion ................................................................... 73 Catch App ........................................................................................................................................ 75 Overview ..................................................................................................................................... 75 Deployment ................................................................................................................................. 75 Results ......................................................................................................................................... 76 Environmental Data ................................................................................................................. 76 Catch Data ............................................................................................................................... 78 Catch App Discussion ................................................................................................................... 85 Data Collection Assessment ..................................................................................................... 86 Fishery Data Collection ............................................................................................................ 86 Environmental Data Collection ................................................................................................. 87 Addressing the Barriers to Data Collection by Fishermen ......................................................... 88 Beyond Catch Data .................................................................................................................. 89 Trialling the use of RFID tags ............................................................................................................ 91 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 91 Methodology ............................................................................................................................... 92 Results ......................................................................................................................................... 93 Discussion ................................................................................................................................... 95 Summary and Discussion ................................................................................................................. 97 References .................................................................................................................................... 102 Lyme Bay Reserve Fully Documented Fishery Trial Executive Summary The Lyme Bay Fisheries and Conservation Reserve