Kell, L. T., Mosqueira, I., Grosjean, P., Fromentin, J-M., Garcia, D., Hillary, R., Jardim, E., Mardle, S., Pastoors, M. A., Poos, J. J., Scott, F., and Scott, R. D. 2007. FLR: an open-source framework for the evaluation and development of management strategies. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 64: 640–646. The FLR framework (Fisheries Library for R) is a development effort directed towards the evaluation of fisheries management strategies. The overall goal is to develop a common framework to facilitate collaboration within and across disciplines (e.g. biological, ecological, statistical, mathematical, economic, and social) and, in particular, to ensure that new modelling methods and software are more easily validated and evaluated, as well as becoming widely available once developed. Specifically, the framework details how to implement and link a variety of fishery, biological, and economic software packages so that alternative management strategies and procedures can be evaluated for their robustness to uncertainty before implementation. The design of the framework, including the adoption of object-orientated programming, its feasibility to be extended to new processes, and its application to new management approaches (e.g. ecosystem affects of fishing), is discussed. The importance of open source for promoting transparency and allowing technology transfer between disciplines and researchers is stressed.

Fishers' knowledge research (FKR) aims to enhance the use of experiential knowledge of fish harvesters in fisheries research, assessment, and management. Fishery participants are able to provide unique knowledge, and that knowledge forms an important part of “best available information” for fisheries science and management. Fishers' knowledge includes, but is much greater than, basic biological fishery information. It includes ecological, economic, social, and institutional knowledge, as well as experience and critical analysis of experiential knowledge. We suggest that FKR, which may in the past have been defined quite narrowly, be defined more broadly to include both fishery observations and fishers “experiential knowledge” provided across a spectrum of arrangements of fisher participation. FKR is part of the new and different information required in evolving “ecosystem-based” and “integrated” management approaches. FKR is a necessary element in the integration of ecological, economic, social, and institutional considerations of future management. Fishers' knowledge may be added to traditional assessment with appropriate analysis and explicit recognition of the intended use of the information, but fishers' knowledge is best implemented in a participatory process designed to receive and use it. Co-generation of knowledge in appropriately designed processes facilitates development and use of fishers' knowledge and facilitates the participation of fishers in assessment and management, and is suggested as best practice in improved fisheries governance.

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For more than a century, scientists have used mark-recapture techniques to describe the spatial dynamics of marine demersal fish species in the North Sea. Although such experiments have provided extensive data sets, the information is limited to the date and position at release and at recapture. Furthermore, these data may be biased due to the distribution of fishing effort. Recently, electronic (archival) data storage tags (DSTs) have successfully been used to reconstruct the movements of free-ranging demersal fish between release and recapture. Data from DST experiments allow the calculation of fisheries independent migration parameters, and thereby provide a means of evaluating conventional tagging data. We compared the migration patterns of North Sea plaice (Pleuronectes platessa L.) as inferred from a database of twentieth century conventional tagging experiments (CT), with data from 132 plaice tagged with DST. In general, the CT experiments allowed a reliable interpretation of migration patterns, although for certain release areas the migration distances were biased due to the heterogeneous distribution of fishing effort. (C) 2004 International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved