ICES Working Group of International Pelagic Surveys (WGIPS)

The Working Group of International Pelagic Surveys (WGIPS) met in Santa Cruz, Tenerife, Spain on 14–18 January 2019, under the chairmanship of Bram Couperus, Netherlands and Michael O’Malley, Ireland. This was the first meeting in the multi-annual ToR term. The core objectives of the Expert Group are to combine and review results of annual pelagic ecosystem surveys to provide indices for the stocks of herring, sprat, mackerel, boarfish, and blue whiting in the Northeast Atlantic, Norwegian Sea, North Sea, and Western Baltic; and to coordinate timing, coverage and methodologies for the upcoming 2019 surveys. A session was held in 2019 to assess auxiliary pelagic ecosystem surveying techniques currently used on surveys coordinated by WGIPS. It was decided that this approach will be continued in future meetings during this term whereby results from the auxiliary monitoring of ecosystem components will be presented in a separate session from the standard fishery survey results for the target species. In practice this means that the session planned under Term of Reference (ToR) h for 2019 will be repeated in 2020 and 2021. Additionally, progress, developments and experiences with the survey analysis software StoX as well as with the ICES acoustic database repository were analysed and discussed amongst users and developers during the meeting and the intention to further consolidate both the software and the database as common tools to be utilized among all surveys coordinated within WGIPS was stated. Further work progressed on editing the current version of the SISP 9 Manual for International Pelagic Surveys and will continue intersessionally. WGIPS requests a workshop to establish and agree on survey design and protocols for coordinating and conducting acoustic surveys on herring spawning aggregations. The workshop will focus on industry acoustic surveys on herring spawning aggregations in 6.a and in the Irish Sea. WGIPS also requests a workshop o