Introduction
This tutorial falls under SEAwise’s work on modelling the impact of fisheries on benthic ecosystems under Work Package 4: Ecological effects of fisheries.
SEAwise largely built upon the assessment methodology from the ICES Working Group on Fisheries Benthic Impact and Trade-offs (WGFBIT Github tutorial) and applied it to several regional seas (Van Hoey et al. 2023). SEAwise also connected these benthic impact risk assessments to (1) spatial modelling approaches to evaluate spatial management scenarios (see Van Hoey et al. 2024; Bastardie et al. 2023, 2024, 2025) and to (2) mixed fisheries models to evaluate effort-related management scenarios developed in a Management Strategy Evaluation framework (Kempf et al. 2024, 2025, Garcia et al. 2025)
Three steps will showcase benthic impact risk assessments (WP4) using outputs from effort-related fisheries management scenarios of the mixed fisheries model FLBEIA in the North Sea.
Simulating depletion scenarios by matching métier resolutions of benthic impact assessments (Benthis-métiers) with fisheries métiers of mixed fisheries models (e.g. NS FBLEIA métiers).
Fast RBS estimation for many simulated scenarios using a vectorized methodology from the terra package.
MSFD assessment of seafloor integrity.