As part of the DiscardLess project work has been conducted to produce tools to assist stakeholders in achieving the gradual elimination of discarding. A number of mapping tools have been developed by the project to provide as much information as possible to fishers to assist in avoiding unwanted catches and to maximise opportunities to catch their quotas.

Using a unique dataset, combining observer data for Irish, French and British fishing vessels operating in the Celtic Sea between 2010 and 2015, maps have been developed to identify where catches of quota restricted species or under minimum conservation reference size catches have been consistent through time, thus indicating where they may be most likely to occur.

The maps have been constructed as follows;

• The data used to construct these maps are based on the entire catch and not just landings.
• Annual data are presented as well as data broken down into each quarter of the year to show how catches vary seasonally.
• Two different catch metrics were used to identify where catches were consisten across time;
  • CPUE (catch per unit effort - kilograms caught per hour) This gives an indication of how the volume of a species in a catch varies and identifies where high or low volumes of certain species are consistently being caught.
  • Proportion of a species in the catch by weight By examining the proportion of a species in the catch an indication is given as to how clean catches are, or if there is a lot of associated bycatch, which is obviously important when trying to avoid unwanted catches.

Within this app the hotspot maps for each of these two catch metrics for each TAC species can be viewed individually. It is also possible to compare different layers from these individual maps for multiple species on one map to identify where different species distributions overlap.