Monitoring of cod catches in Dutch otter trawls and seines

This report presents the results of the Dutch Cod Monitoring Project in the bottom trawls and seines (TR), that was carried out in 2011 and 2012. The monitoring project was set up to monitor the cod catches in the different TR gears in order to have better and more detailed information of the catch per unit effort (CpUE) of cod. The Dutch government requested IMARES to set this up in order to arrive at a well-documented conversion factor of the days at sea (DAS) transfer between different fishing gears. This transfer of effort is needed due to the transition of the Dutch fleet from a predominant BT fleet to much more TR vessels. The conversion factor of transfer of DAS from the beam trawl (BT) segment to the TR segment is impacted by the Cod Recovery Plan