Toward a European rocky reef fish monitoring network

Duration

2024-2025

Partners involved

The pilot is coordinated by the French Office for Biodiversity (OFB) and involves partners from five other countries: Norway, Denmark, Spain, Turkey, and Israël.

External collaboration

The pilot collaborates with European Marine Biological Resource Centre (EMBRC), which aims to accelerate marine science and innovation by facilitating access to marine biodiversity, ecosystems, and state-of-the-art research services in Europe. EMBRC coordinated the development of the European Marine Omics Biodiversity Observation Network (EMO BON).

More information

Gaëlle Legras & Pierre Thiriet

Context

Several marine policies and biodiversity management frameworks require the monitoring and assessment of the ecological status of European reef fish. These include the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), Regional Seas Conventions (RSC) like the Oslo-Paris Convention (OSPAR), the Helsinki Convention (HELCOM), the Barcelona Convention, and the requirements for Marine Protected Areas (MPAs),Other Effective Conservation Measures (OECMs), and Offshore Wind Farms (OWFs).

However, observational methods used across Europe are heterogeneous, and some traditional methods (e.g., nets and pots) are invasive, causing fish mortality and impacting sensitive habitats. This has led to an increasing demand for non-invasive and interoperable methods for fish monitoring and ecological status assessments. In addition, European reef fish scientific experts are not well organised in a network, making it difficult to harmonise monitoring protocols and data analysis routines to compute Good Environmental Status (GES) indicators and Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) at the pan-European level.

Main objectives

The main objectives of this pilot are to:

  • Develop and test homogenised protocols for two traditional methods, Underwater Visual Census (UVC) and Baited Remote Underwater Video (BRUV), along with a novel complementary method, metabarcoding on environmental DNA (eDNA);
  • Validate the methodological framework that combines the three sampling methods;
  • Optimise and harmonise sampling designs across methods and partners;
  • Produce a methodological guideline for reef fish monitoring under public policies (MSFD, RSC, MPAs).

Main activities

The main activities implemented during this pilot are:

  • Developing consensual protocols to monitor fish assemblages for UVC, BRUV, and eDNA;
  • Conducting fieldwork to test the monitoring protocols and collect new data;
  • Based on critical and statistical power analysis and feedback from the active contributors, proposing an update of the protocols and monitoring strategy to plan for the long-term monitoring of rocky reef fish in European and contiguous seas.