Environmental change, and a range of human impacts across the Northern Hemisphere are placing salmon at risk across their natural range. The wild salmon crisis is now widely recognised and we have been working in partnership with the Scottish Government to collate information about the spatial extent and severity of pressures which can impact our wild salmon.
Fishery Management Plans
Fisheries Management Planning provides a framework for District Salmon Fishery Boards (DSFBs) and Fisheries Trusts to document and undertake evidence-based management of Atlantic salmon and sea trout and their fisheries. This project created a suite of 44 fishery management plans which set out the limiting factors within the fishery and the actions required to overcome them. The plans set out the key actions required to protect and restore Scotland’s wild salmon populations, ranging from specific fisheries management actions to large-scale catchment restoration and actions to improve resilience to climate change.
Development of the plans was coordinated by Fisheries Management Scotland and delivered by the District Salmon Fishery Boards and Rivers and Fisheries Trusts, with support from the Scottish Fisheries Co-ordination Centre. This work was funded by Crown Estate Scotland and the Scottish Government and delivers one of the actions identified in Scotland’s Wild Salmon Strategy Implementation Plan.
The plans were created using ESRI storymaps. This functions like a webpage and allows for interactive map-based data to be integrated into the plan as well as text, photos and videos. These plans were initially designed for a 5-year lifespan, however the ability to review them has been built-in from their inception, allowing government and local managers to assess progress against Scotland's Wild Salmon Strategy and the accompanying Implementation Plan. One of the benefits of using the online mapping approach is that it allows fisheries management actions right across Scotland can be accessed via a single map, and users can interrogate the dashboard to find out more about issues and solutions in their local area.
The collection of plans and an interactive dashboard of actions are now available.
This online dashboard allows common actions, themes, pressures and challenges to our fish and fisheries to be identified at a broad range of scales – from local impacts to national pressures. Crucially, this also contains information of the costings of the actions: capital costs, annual costs, in-kind contributions and funding shortfall. Actions which are undertaking actions for which there are existing Nature Finance markets can be easily identified and together with costing information may provide an easily accessible bank of projects in need of funding to potential investors.
Pressures Mapping
Through the Scottish Fisheries Coordination Centre, we have developed a web-based data collection and mapping tool to support fisheries managers to communicate information about the pressures acting on Atlantic salmon in Scotland. The pressures mapping project is the first national summary assessment of the pressures acting on wild Atlantic salmon. The outputs from the project can be viewed in three ways: interactive maps for local catchments and river reaches showing the extent and impact of key salmon pressures; an application which allows you to view summary data at different geographic scales; and, a summary report, describing the results at a local, regional and national scale. These outputs can be accessed below.
This work was supported by a grant from the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund and technical inputs from the Scottish Fisheries Coordination Centre and Marine Scotland Science. The pressure mapping work was updated, refined and refreshed in spring 2021 with financial support from the Scottish Government.
