Following a recent meeting in Toulouse, the EcoScope Project coordinator, Athanassios Tsikliras of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, visited Vancouver in mid-November with the goal of strengthening the collaboration between the project and its UBC partners.
EcoScope is an initiative that aims to promote an effective and efficient, ecosystem-based approach to fisheries management.
The project is made of over two dozen partners that include universities, non-governmental organizations, government agencies and private sector groups, who are working together to develop an interoperable platform, a decision-making toolbox, a series of online courses and a mobile application, all of which will be available through a single public portal.
The four-year (2021-2025) project addresses ecosystem degradation and the anthropogenic impact that causes fisheries to be unsustainably exploited in several European Seas. It also aims to promote efficient, holistic, sustainable, ecocentric fisheries management that will aid in restoring fisheries sustainability and ensuring a balance between food security and healthy seas.
The Sea Around Us at the University of British Columbia is one of the partners supporting EcoScope’s mission by developing a data linking platform and providing reconstructed fisheries catch and effort data to support ecosystem and fisheries models, as well as country and ecoregion-based stock assessments.
These contributions are essential to a number of focus areas of the EcoScope project, namely, project management; the assessment of societal expectations, economic values and human impacts; linking fisheries to the ocean; the interaction with stakeholders, and capacity building.