JNCC and SNH Fisheries Management Guidance Documents
Background
The fisheries guidance has been produced to provide advice on
the impact various fishing activities may have on MPA features in
Scotland’s seas. The advice is organised by features and gear types
and is available from the list below. Fishing gears are grouped to
combine those with broadly similar impacts, but where there is
likely to be variation within a group of features (e.g. for high
and low energy sand habitats), this has been taken into account.
Where possible the guidance has been based on evidence from
peer-reviewed scientific journals. The fisheries guidance documents
have been reviewed by representatives from the fishing sector
and Marine Scotland Science.
Format of the guidance
The advice on fisheries management
falls into three broad categories:
- Gear/feature combinations that are unlikely
to cause unacceptable impacts (except possibly at very high levels
of effort) and so no additional management is likely to be
required;
- Gear/feature combinations that are likely to
cause unacceptable impacts and for which no possible mitigation
measures could be identified at this stage other than closure to
that gear;
- Gear/feature combinations that are likely to
cause some degree of impacts but for which management may be
possible to mitigate the effects (e.g. modification or restriction
of certain gears, partial or temporary area closures, effort
limitation).
In the last type of cases in particular,
further site-specific evidence gathering and discussion with
stakeholders will be required to determine the appropriate
management measures.
How the guidance has been used
The fisheries management guidance has been
used, along with the FEatures
Activities Sensitivities Tool (FEAST), to inform the development of
management options papers for each MPA. These papers can be viewed
on each of the MPA pages on the Scottish
MPA page of the JNCC website.
Fisheries guidance by feature
A full list of references supporting the fisheries guidance is
available
here.