Publication Abstract

Crustacean fisheries: Foreword. proceedings of the conference on Life History Assessment and Management of Crustaceans, La Coruna, Galicia, Spain, 8-11October 2001

Crustacean fisheries: Foreword. proceedings of the conference on Life History Assessment and Management of Crustaceans, La Coruna, Galicia, Spain, 8-11October 2001

By O. Tully, J. Freire, and J.T. Addison

The conference on Life Histories, Assessment and Management of Crustaceans was held in La Coruna, Galicia, Spain from 8 to 11 October 2001, and was convened by the EDFAM (European Decapod Fish­eries: Assessment and Management) project. This 3-year Concerted Action project is funded by the European Commission under the Fifth Framework Programme (Project QLK5 1999 0131), which aims to review the assessment and management systems for crustacean fisheries in Europe while looking to the rest of the world for examples of best practice.

Fisheries for crustaceans are now of high impor­tance globally with clawed and spiny lobsters, crabs and penaeid shrimps in high demand on world mar­kets. In Europe approximately 22 crustacean species are fished commercially, with the fisheries for species such as Nephrops norvegicus, Cancer pagurus, Homarus gammarus, and Parapenaeus longirostris being highly ranked in terms of total landings and value compared to finfish species in a number of European countries.

The EDFAM project was initiated because of the increasing importance of crustacean fisheries in Eu­rope and because assessments and management of these fisheries are in many cases poorly developed. A number of the fisheries are relatively new (10–20 years) and basic distribution and behaviour data are still being collected. Other well established fisheries have expanded offshore in recent years. The con­ference aimed to bring together plenary and session papers on key topics from leading international re-searchers that reflects the scope and diversity of research on the biology and assessment of crustaceans currently being undertaken throughout the world. The conference included themes on biology and life history, assessment of the local population, metapop­ulations and the management of crustacean fisheries. In these proceedings the papers have been subsumed into two themes; biology and recruitment (Part I) and assessment and management (Part II). A total of 55 papers and were presented at the conference, and 54 manuscripts were submitted for publication, of which 33 were accepted for publication following peer review.

Reference:

O. Tully, J. Freire, and J.T. Addison. 2003. Crustacean fisheries: Foreword. proceedings of the conference on Life History Assessment and Management of Crustaceans, La Coruna, Galicia, Spain, 8-11October 2001.Fisheries Research, 65; 1-2

O. Tully, J. Freire, and J.T. Addison*

Fisheries Research (1-3) 65; 1-2pp