Working Group on Crangon Fisheries and Life History (WGCRAN)

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. A central goal of the group is to provide a biological basis for advice and to identify ways for sustainable management.

Next to the reporting of the international landing statistics from 2022, a main outcome of the 2023 meeting was the decision/initiative to create a common workflow for uniform data retrieval of international survey data from the ICES DATRAS data base. From 2024 onwards, biological stock status indicators (swept area biomass, annual mortality, and fraction of large shrimp) shall be accessible by the use of one common R script. For transparency, all workflows of WGCRAN will be stored and made accessible at GitHub.

The meeting further aimed at discussing and reporting on different approaches of population modelling, i.e. potential improvements of data inputs, giving updates on ongoing national projects related to Crangon research (e.g. gear technology, national legislation) and presenting the results of the trilateral bycatch co-sampling programmes which were reported to the Scheveningen group in May 2023.