IFM 2017, Belfast – The Big Fish
MOREFISH attendance: Ronan Cooney (NUIG)
Presentation: Poster
The Institute of Fisheries Management annual conference was held in Belfast from the 10th – 12th of October 2017. The event was very well attended with delegates from Ireland, the UK and the USA to name a few. This was the Institutes 48th annual conference and featured expert speakers, a range of topics were covered including: fisheries management, telemetry, eel management, genetics and genomics, barriers to migration, natural flood management and monitoring and management of habitats and invasive species.
All presentations over the course of the conference were of a very high standard with some of the talks of note covering the use of eDNA (environmental DNA) as a tool in fisheries management and the waterframework directive, the thermal buffering offered by riparian tree cover and channel morphology in the face of a warming climate and the benefits of natural flood management and its benefits to fisheries and aquatic ecology.
One of the fieldtrips of the conference was a trip to the Lough Neagh Fishermans Co-Op. This Co-Op accounts for 16% of the annual European Eel catch in the EU. On the day of the fieldtrip the delegates were lucky enough to arrive for the grading of the previous nights catch of one and a half tonne, of silver eels.
Below is link to a video of the grading which was shared on Twitter:
Very informative afternoon spent @LoughNeaghEels as part of #IFMIRELAND2017 fieldtrip.@IFMFish pic.twitter.com/vt6tr8qFXE
— MOREFISH (@MOREFISHproject) October 11, 2017
Featured image courtesy of the IFM.
