Search

The marine environment faces an increasing number of threats, mainly driven by anthropogenic activities, that are causing growing impacts on marine species and processes. In Europe, the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) aims to achieve or maintain Good Environmental Status (GES) of the European waters by 2020. The Directive specifically refers to biodiversity with the first of the eleven qualitative descriptors (proposed to help describe what GES should look like) being Biodiversity is maintained. For this descriptor, the status of several functional groups, including marine megafauna species, need to be assessed using criteria such as population size and condition, and mortality due to bycatch in fishing gear, that compare current values against agreed thresholds. To contribute to this process, we performed an assessment of the threats affecting the marine megafauna community (i.e. seabirds and cetaceans) in the Bay of Biscay synthesizing the available evidences and identifying the main threats affecting the marine megafauna to help prioritise the required management and conservation actions. We analysed 4,023 admissions of seabirds recorded during 2004–2016 from four Wildlife Rehabilitation Centres to obtain an initial quantitative assessment of the pressures exerted on seabirds. The main marine threats identified in the Spanish North Atlantic sub-region were cachexia (52.3%), exposure to crude oil (10%) and interaction with fishing gears (5.3%). When considering all threats together, the common guillemot, the yellow-legged gull, the northern gannet, the great cormorant and the razorbill were the main affected species. In addition, we summarised the available information to perform an updated qualitative assessment of the severity of the threats faced by seabirds and cetaceans. The qualitative assessment showed that cetaceans are especially vulnerable to bycatch, vessel collision, and pollution-related threats, whilst seabirds are particularly sensitiv

Over the last two decades, fisheries surveys have shifted their focus, from providers of data for single fish stock assessments to become platforms for the multidisciplinary integrated monitoring of ecosystems (including the continued provision of the data necessary for assessing fish stocks). Such change in focus was possible in part because new research vessels built in the 1990s were sufficiently large and equipped for multidisciplinary teams to work simultaneously onboard. The shift in survey objectives, and the data provided, supported changes in policies for implementing ecosystem based approaches. In many countries around the Atlantic, sectoral fisheries management is now embedded into ecosystem conservation and environmental legislation. Similarly, integrated maritime policies now require collecting data on major ecosystem components to monitor the achievement of good environmental status. Presently, fisheries surveys undertaken yearly over large marine areas have become the multidisciplinary platforms providing the required data.