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Coastal habitats worldwide face various threats, including sea level rise and land conversion. Coastal habitat loss has important economic consequences, as many of these habitats provide valuable ecosystem services including flood protection, carbon sequestration, and nursery areas for commercially fished species. Quantifying the economic value of these ecosystem services helps target policies for coastal habitat restoration. Here, we demonstrate how to quantify the contribution made by coastal habitats to the revenue (e.g., ex‐vessel values) of commercially fished species by estimating a residency index. This residency index weights the relative importance of a habitat along a species' lifecycle by explicitly incorporating the target species' life histories and the estimated proportion of time the species spends in that habitat at different life stages. We demonstrate how this method can be used to estimate the value of saltmarsh to UK commercial fisheries landings. This analysis suggests that UK saltmarsh contributes annually between 15% and 17.5% of total UK commercial landings for European seabass (Dicentrarchus labrax), European plaice (Pleuronectes platessa), and Common sole (Solea solea). Our findings support an economic argument for saltmarsh protection and restoration. Furthermore, our approach provides a general framework that integrates demographic methods and economic analyses to assess the value of saltmarsh and other coastal habitats for fisheries worldwide.

The main objective of the Working Group on Biological Parameters (WGBIOP) is to review the status, issues, developments, and quality assurance of biological parameters for use in assess-ments and management that are in line with the requirements of end-users. In this final year of the three-year term, WGBIOP operated under challenging circumstances due to COVID-19 measures. The initial action plan was replaced by a more flexible one, where online plenary and subgroup meetings were spread over the year with intersessional work to finalize the proposed deliverables. WGBIOP continued the review of past exchanges and workshops under the remit of the working group. Since 2019, these calibrations on age, maturity, and larvae identification have been carried out in SmartDots, an online platform for sharing images and facilitating the reading of otoliths, staging of gonads, and identification of early life stages. Developments are underway to include an improved calculation of modal age and error matrices in the SmartDots standard report. WGBIOP investigated ways to incorporate error matrices into assessments and studied the effect of this inclusion together with stock assessors. Requests for new exchanges and workshops were reviewed, with a focus on stocks to be bench-marked in the coming years. Issue lists were scrutinized, problems identified, and information provided to stock coordinators via regular channels and through the Stock Identification Data-base (SID). Despite close cooperation with stock assessors and continued efforts, it has not been possible to further streamline the WGBIOP workflow with the benchmark process. This will be addressed with the Advisory Committee. The need for validation studies was stressed by the repeated low levels of agreement between readers of some stocks and recurring issues and recommendations to WGBIOP. Lack of resources is the main obstacle. As a first step for measures to prioritize validation studies, WGBIOP iden-tified precision, trueness, and feasibility of validation methods (as well as the urgency for the assessment). WGBIOP continued investigations into new life-history parameters for integrated assessment and advice in cooperation with end-users (Working Group on Integrative, Physical-biological and Ecosystem Modelling-WGIPEM and Regional Coordination Groups-RCGs). This included a standardization and quality assurance action plan for stomach sampling. Efforts have also been taken to streamline data and workflows across databases and groups. A step has been taken in the standardization of quality assurance procedures at the regional level. Institute-level overviews of methods and quality assurance protocols used for ageing and maturity are now available. Also, a new method for quality grading was developed, tested, and implemented in SmartDots.

This thesis is about justice between people born at different times: the way in which they interact and the extent to which those interactions can be a matter of justice. Its principal aims are: to present certain theories that describe what justice over time might look like; to present certain theoretical problems for this subject; and to understand the impact of these problems upon these theories. The thesis draws mainly upon: the work of David Hume, John Rawls and David Gauthier as sources of certain social contract theories; and the work of Wilfred Beckerman, Gustaf Arrhenius and Derek Parfit for certain problems faced by these theories. The central argument of the thesis is that the theoretical obstacles to the application of justice thrown up by the temporal dimension are not as significant as they might appear. In particular, there are good reasons to believe that social contract theories are more susceptible to intertemporal extension and less encumbered by temporally-related problems than previously thought. The conclusion of the thesis is that, issuing from a clearer view of certain theoretical obstacles to their inclusion, there is significant potential for future people to be considered within the scope of justice over time as described by certain social contract theories and that present people have self-interested reasons to take this project seriously.

The 12th RCM North Atlantic was held in Hamburg (Germany) 14-18 September 2015. The main purpose of the RCM is to coordinate the National Programmes (NP) of the Member States (MS) in the North Atlantic region. National Programmes for 2011-2013 have been rolled over for the period 2014-2016. Therefore, the main focus at this year was to improve regional data collection, analysis and storage and the evolution towards Regional Coordination Groups (RCG).The impact of the introduction of the landing obligation and preparations for its implementation was also discussed taking into account possible changes in scientific sampling schemes. The participation of four National Correspondents make possible to address National administration issues related to the oncoming EU MAP. A data call was launched by the chairs of the RCM NA, RCM Baltic and RCM NS&EA where MS were requested to upload data for 2014 in the regional database (RDB Fishframe) hosted by ICES. All MS except France and Northern Ireland complied with this request on landings and effort data. All MS except France uploaded sample data for 2014. French data were available for the meeting using a web base interface. Evaluation of the data call for submission data to the RDB revealed the numbers of species in landings and sample data and the numbers of metiers in effort data are in general data stable. RCM NA see big improvements in the work MS are doing regarding data calls coming from a situation where some countries didn´t provide any data to a new scenario where everyone is providing data; at the same time the overall quality has significantly improved, which is a large step forward. Regional data collection, analysis, storage and the evolution towards Regional Coordination Groups (RCG). Optimizing and harmonizing fisheries management across MS is dependent on improving regional coordination. The group discussed various needs and aspects relevant for facilitating future work of the RCM. Future tasks for the RCM don’t differ much from the current tasks. The discussion was focused on the structure of the RCGs, funding and short term needs to address tasks in an efficient way in the future. Regional coordination encompasses many different aspects, ranging from regional cooperation, sampling design, quality control procedures, data storage and analysis to the actual coordination, reporting and accountancy. Current task sharing and coordination procedures as well as future mechanisms are partially covered under the current MARE study 2014/19 (FISHPI). The project and its progress were presented to the group. The outcomes of this study will demonstrate future procedures based on case studies. As substantial effort and costs are involved to facilitate the process of regional coordination, the group highlighted the importance to access to budgets to cover these costs. Development of the RDB is also crucial for future work of the RCGs; funds are needed for the development. Additionally, RCM NA identified 4 supra regional topics where work can be done intersesionally in cooperation with the rest of RCMs: (1) Cost sharing of funding surveys; (2) Impact of landing obligation; (3) reviewing the ICES list of data needs ; and (4) review and follow up on RDB upload logs. Due to the importance to moving to a regional catch sampling scheme, an exercise was realised using the distribution of landings by harbour and fleet segment as a proxy of sampling frames that could hypothetically operate in a regional probability based design. The exercise was based on landing weight, for the simple reason that this was the only complete variable that was available for all the various national data sets. A regional sampling design can however be optimized in any number of ways (e.g. by landings value, by métier diversity, by species diversity, by number of fishing trips). The aims and aspirations of the end users need to be defined to ascertain which is most appropriate. It is one of the overriding advantages of a regional sampling design (as opposed to the aggregation of national designs) that the overall coverage can be set out to achieve regional goals. The RCM NA analyzed and discussed the main achievements of WKISCON2. It was clear that concurrent sampling at-sea is a long-established practice in most MS and that, where it was applied, concurrent sampling of fishing trips on-shore resulted in substantial increases in species collected without jeopardizing the main uses of data. Stock assessment and discard estimation and management are the major current uses of concurrent sampling data. Concurrent sampling has also been providing other benefits than its initial reason, such as advice to local, national and international authorities, research on MSFD descriptors, mixed fisheries and gear interactions and on mortality of rare species, data-poor stocks and PETS. It was clear that concurrent sampling being a statistically valid method for species selection which has proven to fulfil different end-users needs, implementation constraints hinder concurrent sampling on-shore. Thus, in order to meet end-users needs and to overcome the constraints that may arise from the implementation of concurrent sampling in some countries, particularly on-shore, RCM NA considers that different statistically sound approaches other than concurrent sampling must be developed to be tested in the field, so they may provide useful alternatives. Introduction of the landing obligation and its impact in the implementation in scientific sampling schemes. In terms of evaluating the impact of the introduction of the Landing Obligation (LO) regulation on data collection, there is only limited experience as the current implementation only covers Pelagic and Industrial fisheries in this region but MS have or are preparing for the implementation where they can. It is currently perceived that this year is a transition period for the pelagic fisheries and that these fisheries and control agencies are not fully implementing the LO (managing but not enforcing). As a result MS did not have a lot of comments on the current year and are in general preparing for next year. During the meeting it was decided to gather further information to address this issue by getting member states who were present to fill in a table on “Monitoring the impact of the landing obligation on data collection in the North Atlantic region” outlining the current state of play. This table could be considered as a live document which should be filled in year by year as the Landing Obligation is phased in. This table will then serve to provide an historical record as countries can document the changes year by year and will also provide guidance and act as a learning tool to all member states on how other countries are implementing the LO. National administrations The group discussed the proposal for task sharing and criteria for joint surveys. RCM NS&EA and RCM NA 2014 discussed a cost model for the present joint MS financed surveys and for future joint surveys. In addition to this model, the RCM NA 2015 highlighted that four categories of surveys should be considered in relation to task sharing and criteria for joint surveys. In the light of cost sharing, the group commented that the current DCF recast proposal refers to ‘exploitation of stocks’ rather than EU TAC or landings. Given the relative stability, EU TAC shares are the preferred basis for sharing costs. The exploitation of stocks shall be interpreted as EU-TAC share as a default. In specific cases, RCGs can in the future agree on different interpretation where needed and feasible. Fully agreement among the group was concerning to the engagement and participation of National Correspondent (NC) in this meeting. The future role of the NCs in the RCG context was discussed, indicating a formal role for the NCs in the RCG process to approve and agree on regional arrangements. However, the current recast of the DCF doesn’t include the formal involvement of the NCs in the coordination procedures and meetings. RCM NA highlights this as potentially problematic for the foreseen formal role of the NCs. Other items on the agenda were the consideration of the follow up of relevant recommendations made last years by Liaison Meeting and presentations and relevant development from ICES, EC and SC-RDB.

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