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.

Table: 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 the Wadden Sea with the locations of the fish monitoring stations.

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