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Update and revision of the ICES Atlas of North Sea fishes: a web-based application

Final Report Summary - ICES-FISHMAP (Update and revision of the ICES Atlas of North Sea fishes: a web-based application)

The ultimate aim of the ICES-FISHMAP project was to create an interactive, web-based North Sea fish atlas focusing on a selected number of important species. The atlas covered 15 species and is divided in 2 sections, namely basic and advanced. The basic section provides an introductory overview of each of the 15 selected species. The advanced section allows the user to make his own distribution map of the 15 species.

Pulling data out from over a million records, the user can choose to plot the map by age or length and over timescale. For more information about each of the species there are comprehensive PDF files including seven chapters for download.

The idea behind the ICES-FISHMAP project is that it represented the first phase of a potential two-phase programme:
1. Phase 1 should be considered as a pilot project that created an interactive, web-based North Sea fish atlas focusing on a selected number of important species.
Phase 2 could be a much larger project using the same framework to:
- widen the species coverage of the interactive North Sea fish atlas to include all species caught in North Sea surveys;
- widen the area coverage of the interactive North Sea fish atlas to cover the North-East Atlantic shelf from the southern Iberian Peninsula to Iceland and Norway and extending, where possible, in the Baltic Sea and Mediterranean Sea;
- produce a colour report 'NE Atlantic Fish Atlas'.