S pain ( m editerranean and g ulf of c adiz ) : catch reconstruction update to 2018

This contribution updates to 2018 a reconstruction of the catches of the Spanish marine fisheries in the Mediterranean (excluding the Balearic Islands) and the Gulf of Cadiz region (i.e., in the Atlantic) that initially covered the years 1950 to 2010. One major issue in this update was the absence of fishing gear information for catch per taxon. To overcome this limitation, datasets from autonomous communities within the two regions were used to estimate the taxon proportions of catch taken by each fishing gear. The other major issue is that we used official landings for the Gulf of Cadiz region from 1985-1999 that were not available for the initial reconstruction to retroactively update catch from 1985-2009 for the Gulf of Cadiz. Assumptions for the reconstruction are explicitly stated in the description below. Introduction This contribution updates to 2018 a reconstruction of the catches of the Spanish marine fisheries in the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Cadiz region (i.e., in the Atlantic) that initially covered the years 1950 to 2010 (Coll et al. 2015, 2016). Updates to the catch reconstructions of the Northwest coast of Spain and to the Balearic Islands are covered elsewhere within this volume by Noël et al. (2020) and Khalfallah et al. (2020) respectively and have been disaggregated from the statistics presented here. In the previous reconstruction by Coll et al. (2015, 2016), a ratio was derived to separate landings data for the Gulf of Cadiz from the data for the entire Northeast Atlantic Ocean (FAO area 27) for 1986 onward. We observed that this approach overestimated landings in this region; therefore, we used official landings from 1985-2010 to retroactively adjust the catch reconstructed for the Gulf of Cadiz. Materials and Methods Reported catch baseline data for the Spanish Mediterranean and the Gulf of Cadiz region We collected time series of reported landings from regional (i.e., Autonomous Regions), fisher guilds (called Cofradías), national (MAPA and other government bodies) and international agencies (i.e., FAO, ICCAT STECF). After reviewing the various databases available, we chose as our main reported landing data source the statistics of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAPA), which are available from 1992 to 2018 for the Spanish Mediterranean7. For the Gulf of Cadiz, we used data from the Andalucia Autonomous Region8 that have data from 1985 to 2018. * Cite as: Sola, I., J.-L.S. Sánchez-Lizaso, B. Derrick and D. Pauly. 2020. Spain (Mediterranean and Gulf of Cadiz): catch reconstruction update to 2018, p. 188-196. In: B. Derrick, M. Khalfallah, V. Relano, D. Zeller and D. Pauly (eds). Updating to 2018 the 1950-2010 Marine Catch Reconstructions of the Sea Around Us: Part I – Africa, Antarctica, Europe and the North Atlantic. Fisheries Centre Research Report 28(5). 7 https://www.mapa.gob.es/es/estadistica/temas/estadisticas-pesqueras/pesca-maritima/estadistica-capturasdesembarcos/default.aspx 8 https://ws142.juntadeandalucia.es/agriculturaypesca/idapes/servlet/FrontController?ec=observatorio Updating to 2018 the 1950-2010 marine catch reconstructions of the Sea Around Us: Part I – Africa, Antarctica, Europe and the North Atlantic 189 The main limitation of both databases is that they have no information on the fishing gear used. Therefore, we used the datasets from two Autonomous Communities (Catalonia and Valencian Region) to estimate, for each taxon, the proportion of catch from each gear type. The average ratio of landings per gear type (trawling, various artisanal gears, purse seine, bottom longline and surface longline) for each taxon present was applied to the MAPA catch data for the Mediterranean. We used a similar approach for the Gulf of Cadiz, which was also adjusted slightly to incorporate the opinions of the local experts and the ratios between different fleets in the region. Discards Recently, several studies have been carried out that provide additional information about discards in European fisheries, including the Spanish Mediterranean fisheries. Among them included some initial studies (Soriano 2000; Mayoll 2005), the ‘MINOUW’ project9 (2015-2019), and the EU Data Collection Framework (DCF 2012-2014)10 documented in Bellido et al. (2014), which estimated discards from bottom trawling. In the case of artisanal fisheries (e.g., gillnets, bottom longline and longline fishing) we used data from the ‘EMPAFISH’ project11 (2003-2005), the ‘MINOUW’ project (2015-2019), and the published literature (Bellido et al. 2014). We reviewed the data available from these projects and derived from them the ‘anchor points’ to estimate the discards from 2010 to 2018. When information was not available for a taxon/gear combination, we used average rates of discards for the gear in question. Finally, to estimate the discards of purse seiners, we used the published literature (Bellido et al. 2014), press releases and interviews of fishers along Spain’s Mediterranean coast. Unreported catch Unreported catches in the Spanish Mediterranean are, as elsewhere, poorly documented. To compensate for this, in 2019, we conducted informal interviews with fishers, fisheries scientists and other experts in the fisheries sector along Spain’s Mediterranean coast. We also included personal observations made during visits to fishing guilds (Cofradías) and fishing ports and used comparisons between on-board sampling and landings. These different sources of information suggest that unreported landings along Spain’s Mediterranean coast have declined to 5-7% from 15-20 % of reported landings a decade ago. There is wide agreement among those who study Spanish domestic fisheries that unreported catches are higher in small scale fisheries than in domestic industrial fishing and that some high value species may have higher unreported catches than the average. Whether a relatively lower unreporting rate also holds for the industrial Spanish distant water fleets fishing outside of Spanish waters remains to be determined. However, in the Gulf of Cadiz, our interviews suggest that unreported catches are around 20% without a decreasing trend. Species with Total Allowable Catches (TACs) such as European anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus) and Norway lobster (Nephrops norvegicus) probably have higher unreported catches than the average. 9 http://minouw-project.eu/ 10 https://datacollection.jrc.ec.europa.eu/index.html 11 https://www.um.es/empafish/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19&Itemid=49 2020 Fisheries Centre Research Reports 28(5) 190 Subsistence catches Subsistence catches are here defined as catches taken home by commercial fishers for family consumption or gifting. However, we also considered an additional estimate for retired fishers who are usually present during fish landing operations and who collect fish for themselves and for their families. Thus, we do not estimate true subsistence fishing, which was deemed to not occur in modern day Spain. We used the published literature (Coll et al. 2015) and fisher interviews to estimate the amount of fish taken home per fisher or person involved, i.e., 1.5 kg of fish per person, per day. We applied this information to estimate the subsistence catch based on the number of fishers, plus 20 % for other persons involved, by year, from 2010 to 2018. Since this had not been considered by Coll et al. (2015), we applied this increase retroactively. Recreational fishing We reviewed the published literature on recreational fishing (notably Morales-Nin et al. 2005; Soliva 2006; Lloret et al. 2008; Font and Lloret 2011; Cardona 2011; Cardona and Morales-Nin 2013; Alos et al. 2014; Morales-Nin et al. 2015; Gordoa et al. 2019; Dedeu et al. 2019). The catch composition and average catch per day tended to be consistent between different studies. However, there is an issue with the estimation of fishing effort in the recreational fishery (RF). It is known that fishers who agree to share their data are the most avid and involved (Strehlow et al. 2012), which may cause overall angling effort to be overestimated (Rocklin et al. 2014). Gordoa et al. (2019) presented two quite different estimates of recreational fishing effort in Spain. We used the more conservative estimation of fishing effort (Gordoa et al. 2019) to avoid the overestimation of recreational fisheries catches. We also assumed that the temporal development of fishing effort is related to the development of recreational fishing licenses. We used the intra-regional distribution of fishing licenses in Andalusia to separate the recreational catches between the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Cadiz. Based on the recent comprehensive study of Spain’s marine recreational fisheries by Gordoa et al. (2019), the original estimate of recreational catches by Coll et al. (2015, 2016) was assumed to be too conservative. Thus, we retroactively raised the original estimates for 1950-2010 from 13.2% of commercial landings in the mid2000s to 18.3% and half that for the 1950-1970s following the original methods by Coll et al. (2015, 2016). Updating the reconstruction of the Gulf of Cadiz region Coll et al. (2015) estimated landings from the Gulf of Cadiz from Spanish landings in the Northeast Atlantic Ocean (FAO area 27) with a linear regression model for 1986-2009. When we compared official landings from the regional government of Andalusia with the original estimates, we observed that they overestimated landings in this region. We have updated their reconstruction using official landings per taxon from 1985 to 2010 and maintained the ratios between landings and the unreported catches. This correction was applied retroactively for 1985-2010 by applying the sectoral and gear allocation per taxon assigned to reported catch by taxon for the Gulf of Cadiz for 2010-2018. Due to the improvement in taxonomic resolution in catch reporting in later years, the taxonomic breakdown was adjusted for the reported catch for 1950-1984. The fiv