Working Group on Crangon Fisheries and Life History (WGCRAN; outputs from 2022 meeting)

The Working Group on Crangon Fisheries and Life History (WGCRAN) works on studying the population dynamics of the brown shrimp Crangon crangon and factors influencing the stock as well the individual species. A central goal of the group is to provide a biological basis for advice and to identify ways for sustainable management.

A main outcome of the 2022 meeting was the standardization of the compilation of commercial data, i.e. the creation of a common workflow for uniform (inter-) national data retrieval. On this basis, total brown shrimp landings, fishing effort and landings per unit effort were discussed.

For the first time, biological stock status indicators, i.e. brown shrimp swept area biomass, annual mortality, and fraction of large shrimp were calculated both with and without incorporating Belgian scientific survey data. For the swept-area biomass, the addition of Belgian data had limited influence.

The meeting finally discussed the status of the international bycatch sampling programmes under the de minimis exemption from the landing obligation. For future common analysis supporting policy decisions, a data format was established for compiling the data collected by each country.