Fish Update
September 12, 2012

The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) is now hosting the Regional Database FishFrame (RDB-FishFrame), a regionally coordinated database platform for fisheries assessments.

The database, which covers fisheries in the North Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, addresses fishery management needs related to the European Union Common Fisheries Policy (CFP).

RDB-FishFrame will ensure a standardized and regional approach to fisheries assessments, increase transparency and documentation of data processing and allow for more standardized statistical analyses of stock assessment input data.

The database will also make it easier for countries to share data and results, and provide information to decision makers in a streamlined way.

“The establishment of RDB-FishFrame at ICES will facilitate a transparent and regional approach to the collection and processing of catch and landings data, resulting in significant improvements in the quality of the fishery-dependent data used in stock assessments, and more cost efficient data collection”, says Katja Ringdahl, Chair of the RDB-FishFrame steering group.

The RDB-FishFrame platform was developed by the National Institute of Aquatic Resources at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU-Aqua) to improve data handling on an international level.

It has been used in Denmark and many other countries bordering the Baltic Sea since 1995 to prepare and analyze fisheries assessments for the Baltic fisheries management area.

RDB-FishFrame is now hosted and maintained by ICES for the preparation and analysis of commercial catch and landing data received from the cooperating countries. The platform is managed and steered by a group comprising Regional Fisheries managers, ICES and European Commission representatives. Funding is provided by the European Commission.

Currently, access to the database is only by login based on the Data Collection Framework regulation.

Original source