Danish sampling of commercial fishery: Overview with special attention to discards 2010 data

Utilization of our common marine reassures has in later years had an increasing focus among the EU member states, with societal demands to reduce discarding. Discards have for many years been an unavoidable component of most commercial fisheries due to management regulation and profit optimizing. However, the first step into reducing the discard problem is to investigate where discard is occurring in larger amounts, to highlight the pattern in different fleet components and to document the monitoring of the sampling program.

In 2010 the total discard observed in Danish waters were 21500 t corresponding to 26% of the total catch from these fleets. In Denmark sampling onboard commercial vessels has been ongoing since 1995. In this report the aim has been to describe the Danish commercial at sea sampling strategy and results from 2010