FAROS
Title: Integral networking of fishing actors to organize a responsible optimal and sustainable exploitation of marine resources
Summary: The EU is prioritising a reduction in the amount of discarded fish and by-catch from Europe’s fishing industry. Current discard practices have environmental and economical impacts. A progressive reduction of discard and by-catch is being encouraged with aims to ensure that all fish and crustaceans caught are brought back to port.
New systems will be required to make best use of the full catch and some recycling/valorisation techniques have already been explored, such as the production of proteins and oils. The project seeks to develop and implement an efficient network for managing discards and by-catch.
The network will integrate key stakeholders from Spain’s fishing industry (fleets, ports, auctions, industries, etc.) with the core objectives of:
- Minimising the amount of discards/by-catch that reach port;
- Using the discards/by-catch to produce chemicals of interest for the food and pharmaceuticals industries.
This work will build on results from a previous LIFE project. In keeping with this objective, several goals will be pursued:
- Reduce unwanted by-catch by better understanding fish behaviour;
- Analyse target fisheries in order to understand their spatial-temporal behaviour, which could be used as a basis to forecast their catch supply during the year;
- Develop a complete characterisation of discards on the selected fisheries (based on proposed automated classification, analysis and data collection tools);
- Conduct studies to clarify valorisation opportunities for different types of marine species that are currently treated as waste by the Spanish fisheries sector
For more information, please visit EurOcean Knowledge Gate.