Fish Monitoring in the Wadden Sea

A number of long-term (> 10 years) fish monitoring programmes are being conducted in the Wadden Sea. These include stow net and fyke programmes, as well as well as trawls.

The trilateral Expert Group Swimway (EG-Swimway) has proposed a common fish monitoring programme in the trilateral World Heritage Area Wadden Sea under the umbrella of the Trilateral Monitoring and Assessment Programme (TMAP).

Eight well-established and proven monitoring programmes of the three countries were selected as candidates for TMAP fish monitoring.

 

Candidate monitoring programmes selected for Trilateral Monitoring and Assessment Programme (TMAP) fish monitoring. Data from Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research are protected by a temporary moratorium and therefore comparability discussions are pending. A Lower Saxon stow net fishery 2005 – 2017 is not an ongoing monitoring programme, but the data set is valuable as a baseline (Source: EG-Swimway, 2022).
Country Fish monitoring programme Gear Period

DE/NL

  Demersal Young Fish Survey 

 Beam trawl

 

 1970-ongoing

 1974-ongoing

SH

  Fish monitoring of the     Schleswig- Holstein Wadden Sea

 Stownet until 2019; since 2020 pelagic trawl

 

 1991-ongoing

SH

   Long-term time series of the AWI between Sylt and the Danish island of Rømø

 Trawl (demersal and  pelagic)

 

 2007-ongoing

LS

   Stownet fisheries

  Stownet

 2014-ongoing

NL

  NIOZ Fyke

 Fyke

 1960-ongoing

NL

    Diadromous fish monitoring in the Wadden Sea (Komwerderzand)

Fyke

 2001-ongoing

DK/NL

    Stownet fishery in the Wadden Sea estuaries

Stownet

 2004-ongoing

DK

Danish rivers

    Mark and recapture (MR)

 2004-ongoing

 
Map of fish monitoring stations
Map of fish monitoring stations of candidate programmes along the Wadden Sea coast, as selected by the trilateral Swimway group (Source: EG-Swimway, 2022).