Report on the second workshop on an alternative approach to the segmentation of fishing fleets : 28-30 March 2022, online workshop

A new approach to the segmentation of fishing fleets was developed in a DCF pilot project at the Thünen Institute of Sea Fisheries and transferred to an R package, referred to as "FS-package" in the following. In March 2021, the first workshop on the novel approach and the FS-package was held with 34 experts representing 15 nations, and major progress in improving the package was made. After implementing the suggestions made by the attendants of the first workshop and identifying the next urgent steps for further developing the novel approach, the creators of the approach organized a second workshop and formulated the following ToRs:

1. Harmonize the data preparation and develop a standardized protocol.
2. Clarify the application of the fleet segmentation approach and evaluate newly developed
tools.
3. Establish regionally consistent fleet segments over multiple member states operating in the same fishing regions.

Besides the mentioned ToRs, various technical issues needed to be addressed before the workshop, the most significant being the publication of the FS-package in the publically available repository GitHub. Regarding ToR 1, newly established, standardized thresholds in a key function assigning stocks to catch data as well as a novel function for automatic data preparation were well received by the participants. However, an appropriate way to pre-separate fleet data to improve the clustering result was not agreed upon. The remaining issues include the grouping of demersal seiners and demersal trawlers in the DCF, no clear agreement on appropriate length pre-segmentation, and the possibility of a regional pre-segmentation, e.g., ICES and non-ICES area fleets.

The workshop participants gave overall positive feedback on the additional new functions of the FS-package. Especially the new functions making use of target assemblages were highlighted, as they have the potential to foster comparability between economic and metiér-based biological fleet classification methods. The regional group work, which was specified in ToR3, comprised the major work conducted during the workshop. A full list of the analyzed regions can be found in Annex 4. Due to the composition of workshop participants, some regions were more well-represented than others, i.e., a comprehensive analysis could be conducted for, e.g., the North Sea and the Northeast-Atlantic, but not, e.g., for the Black Sea. Despite this imbalance in the analysis, the overall feedback of the regional group analyses was positive, and regionally consistent fleet segments could be identified in all adequately represented regions. Nevertheless, more detailed, extensive, and inclusive work in separate regional sessions is necessary for an adequate regional analysis of fishing fleets.

In conclusion, we highlight the necessity of a standardized workflow to classify and name fleet segments. In addition, an artificial intelligence analysis approach developed in cooperation with the technical university of Kaiserlautern significantly improves the applicability of the FS-package. A corresponding publication is in preparation, and the AI approach needs to be included in the terms of reference of a future fleet segmentation workshop. All considerations and discussions of reforming the DCF fleet segmentation procedure need to take into account the criteria of the suitability of a fleet segmentation procedure. We identified a close connection of segments to fisheries, a homogenous cost structure of the resulting fleet segments, and the feasibility of the approach as the most important.