Ecocentric management for sustainable fisheries and healthy marine ecosystems
The EcoScope project will develop an interoperable platform and a robust decision-making toolbox, available through a single public portal, to promote an efficient, ecosystem-based fisheries management. It will be guided by policy makers and scientific advisory bodies, and address ecosystem degradation and the anthropogenic impact that are causing fisheries to be unsustainably exploited across European Seas. The EcoScope Platform will organise and homogenise climatic, oceanographic, biogeochemical, biological and fisheries datasets for European Seas to a common standard type and format that will be available through interactive mapping layers. The EcoScope Toolbox, a scoring system based on assessments of all ecosystem components, ecosystem and economic models, will operate as a decision-support tool for examining fisheries management and marine policy scenarios and spatial planning simulations. Groups of end-users and stakeholders will be involved in the design, development and operation of both the platform and the toolbox. Novel assessment methods for data-poor fisheries, including non-commercial species, as well as for biodiversity and the conservation status of protected megafauna, will be used to assess the status of all ecosystem components across European Seas and test new technologies for evaluating the environmental, anthropogenic and climatic impact on ecosystems and fisheries. A series of sophisticated capacity building tools (online courses, webinars and games) will be available to stakeholders through the EcoScope Academy. The EcoScope project will provide an effective toolbox to decision makers and end-users that will be adaptive to their capacity, needs and data availability. The toolbox will incorporate methods for dealing with uncertainty; thus, it will promote efficient, holistic, sustainable, ecosystem-based fisheries management that will aid towards restoring fisheries sustainability and ensuring balance between food security and healthy seas.