North Aegean Sea - Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries

Recent decisions and directions from the European Union will probably result in the adoption of an ecosystem approach to fisheries management in the future. Currently there is no clear EAF management plan for the area. Several research projects aim towards this direction, linking fishery resources to environmental drivers, food-web dynamics, oceanographic processes etc, integrating information from different disciplines (fishery, oceanography, socio-economics). These works include, among others, ecosystem models (e.g., Ecopath), habitat models, individual-based models, biogeochemical lower trophic level (LTL) models, and end-to-end (E2E) models are under development. The intent is that these tools will prove useful for the implementation of EAF.