Monitoring the Environmental, Social and Economic Dimensions of the Landing Obligation Policy

15 pages,3 figures, 3 tables, supplementary material https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2019.00594/full#supplementary-materialAiming to end the practice of discarding unwanted catches back to the sea within European marine waters, an obligation to land the catches of all regulated commercial species was introduced with the Common Fisheries Policy, with required implementation by the first of January 2019. The implementation of this new fisheries regulation urges the definition of standard monitoring protocols to track potential changes in the European fisheries. Importantly, this framework needs to be multi-dimensional to capture the ecological, social and economic components of the fisheries system. Aiming to address this challenge, a set of 39 candidate indicators were identified by means of literature review and expert consultation. Experts in European fisheries were gathered to discuss the selection of a restricted set of indicators and later, a remote survey was completed by the experts to assess the adequacy of the indicators against pre-defined quality criteria and to identify expected direction of change. Based on survey results, the candidate indicators were ranked according to their adequacy for monitoring of the landing obligation (LO) potential effects. This ranking was dominated by indicators related to the exploited species, rather than the social or economic dimensions of the fisheries. Because the LO is not yet fully implemented, experts expressed uncertainty in the properties of many indicators, particularly related to ecosystem properties and social system properties, and had divergent opinions on the effect of the LO on discard numbers. The feasibility to operationalize a monitoring framework with the prioritized indicators was explored with data from a Spanish demersal otter-trawl fishery. This exercise evidenced that most indicators can be routinely collected and that it would be feasible to track these variables over time in the framework of a monitoring program. However, gaps exist in the time series of the studied indicators, especially for the period after the LO implementation. This study can provide valuable baseline information for any future monitoring program, as its objective was the development of a methodological approach that contributes to science-based policy making and to indicator selection for fisheries management reformsThis study was developed in the framework of MINOUW EU project (Project ID: 634495). SJ was funded by H2020-Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action MSCA-IF-2016 (Project ID: 743545)Peer Reviewe