Working Group on International Deep Pelagic Ecosystems Surveys (WGIDEEPS)

The Working Group on International Deep Pelagic Ecosystem Surveys (WGIDEEPS) plans, conducts and reports on the international trawl-acoustic surveys on pelagic redfish in the Irminger and Norwegian seas.

The international trawl-acoustic survey (IDEEPS) on pelagic redfish in the Norwegian Sea in July/August 2022 will be conducted by Norway with one research vessel only. The detailed planning of the survey was presented and discussed and has been agreed by all Member Countries of the working group. As only one research vessel is conducting the survey, the entire distribution of pelagic redfish in the Norwegian Sea cannot be covered.

The survey will cover the part of the Sebastes mentella stock in the Norwegian Sea between 70°N and 80°N and bounded by the 400 m isobath in the East and the Mohn – Knipovich ridge in the West. The area comprises parts of the Norwegian EEZ, the Svalbard Fisheries Protection Zone and adjacent international waters. The area north of 76.33°N is optional, depending on the available time. The survey is a trawl-acoustic survey, using a Simrad EK80 echosounder and a Gloria 2048 HO pelagic trawl with a multisampler with three codends to resolve the distribution of beaked redfish in the water column. This year the Deep Vision camera system will be included for the first time, to afford counting and length measurements. In later years this should help to avoid the killing more fish than necessary for aging and maturity staging.

It was decided to incorporate the manual of the Norwegian Sea survey into SISP 11 – IDEEPS VI, which currently only contains the information on the survey in the Irminger Sea and adjacent waters.

Also, it was decided that in the future the survey data of IDEEPS should be uploaded to the ICES Acoustic Data Portal instead of DATRAS, because the Acoustic Data Portal is able to handle not only the biological trawl data but also the hydroacoustic data.