ICES Strategic Plan, launched in 2014, commits to building a foundation of science around one key challenge: integrated ecosystem understanding. Here, Mark Dickey-Collas, ICES Ecosystem Professional Officer, explains what integrated means to ICES science and advice.

1. What do we mean by integrated?
Mark Dickey-Collas

2. Integrated?
Integrated monitoring and surveys
Integrate science into advice
Integrate across disciplines
Integrate across sectors

3. Disciplines
Integrated...
Provision of joined-up
advice to address
society’s needs to
manage anthropogenic
pressures on the marine
ecosystem.
Exploring the space for
decision making.

4. ICES must provide integrated advice...
EU - New CFP
“ensure that fishing activities are environmentally sustainable in the
long term and are managed with the objectives of achieving
economic and social benefits, and maintain food supplies”
Agreement between EU & ICES
“advisory deliverables shall be based on an ecosystem approach
consistent with the targets and objectives for GES determined
through MSFD”
Habitats Directive, Birds Directive etc

5. Norway, Iceland, Russia, USA & Canada
International commitments to the Ecosystem Approach
Regional integrated management
•
Norwegian and Barents Seas
• In USA and Canada
Norwegian Marine Resources Act
Russian Federal Law on Fisheries and conservation of biological
resources in the waters
Icelandic Fisheries Management Act
Faroe Islands Fisheries Management Act

6. New

7. Four Pillars

8. Goals
3 of 7
1. Develop an integrated, interdisciplinary understanding of the
structure, dynamics, and the resilience and response of
marine ecosystems to change
2. Understand the relationship between human activities and
marine ecosystems, estimate pressures and impacts, and
develop science-based, sustainable pathways
3. Evaluate and advise on options for the sustainable use and
protection of marine ecosystems

9. Advice must be consistent across issues
Mixed fisheries and multispecies interactions
Food web interactions
Rare and endangered species
Bycatch issues, impacts of gear
Sensitive habitats / MPAs
Marine Spatial Planning

10. ICES Regional Groups
WGIBAR
WGINOR
WGIAB
WGINOSE
WGEAWESS
WGNARS

11. Advice: consider change and variability
Impact of Ecosystem Drivers
Impact of Anthropogenic Pressures

12. Bring in new scientific thinking and evidence
•
•
•
•
•
Keep challenging our approaches
ACOM & SCICOM catalyse each other
Appropriate tools
Process studies
Stay credible
Work with research councils and EU projects

13. Implications of integration?
Leave our comfort zones
Work across new disciplines through teams
Work in a complex changing system
- science support and governance

14. Management objectives
Society will choose objectives
- we may find difficult to justify through science
But they are tools to aid integration
– provide a target at which to aim
Show tradeoffs in development and
implementation of objectives

15. Evidence Base
Advice will be created from evidence of differing
integrity, sources and certainty.
Learn to integrate the more certain with the less certain,
combine across management objectives and show tradeoffs

16. Start to dialogue - IEA now
ICES IEA groups make tools & methods
Need to build participatory processes
Stimulate policy developers
Carry out simple IEAs (ICES Advice Plan)

17. Expect complexity, stay adaptive
ICES Science policy landscape

18. Integrating mixed evidence & objectives
Data & knowledge provision
for biodiversity & ecosystem function
high
Cat 1
Data & knowledge
provision for yield
Cat 2
Cat 3
Cat 4
Cat 5
Cat 6
medium
low

19. It is an iterative process
Thank
you
FAO Ecosystem Approach