ECOAST has been co-funded by the COFASP “Cooperation in Fisheries, Aquaculture and Seafood Processing” – ERA-net. COFASP is an ERA-NET created to directly address actions envisaged within fisheries, aquaculture and seafood. It was created as under the KBBE theme in FP7. ECOAST was in particular funded through COFASP second call “Resource optimisation, mapping and reduction of ecological footprint, environmental sustainability of aquaculture, fisheries and seafood processing and interaction with other production”.
Budget:
Total budget: € 2,555,000
Funded budget: € 2,273,800
About the Project:
ECOAST aimed to identify, develop and test new methodologies for spatial and temporal management of fisheries and aquaculture in coastal areas. The overall approach assessed the impact of fisheries and aquaculture on coastal ecosystems, as well as synergies and conflicts between human activities. Building on previous methodologies and experiences the project evaluated marine spatial planning in seven coastal case study areas with different ecological and socio-economic characteristics: Adriatic Sea, Ionian Sea, Black Sea, Tyrrhenian Sea, Baltic Sea, Norwegian fjords and North-East Atlantic coast. The project outcomes produced a case specific evaluation of the ecological footprints of aquaculture and fisheries in coastal areas, maps of optimal use areas for fisheries and aquaculture, evaluation of compatibility between fisheries, aquaculture and other human activities in coastal areas, as well as implementation of holistic methods and an operational modelling framework to evaluate and predict stakeholder responses to coastal spatial management options covering marine cross sector occupation of space.
The 7 case study areas of the ECOAST project. Source: project web-site
Project partners:
ECOAST technical partners are:
National Research Council, Institute of Marine Science (Italy)- Coordinator
The Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (Italy)
Technical University of Denmark (Denmark)
International Research Institute of Stavanger (Norway)
Institute for Marine Research (Norway)
Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (Greece)
National Institute for Marine Research and Development "G.Antipa" Constanta (Romania)
Institute of Biomedical Science Abel Salazar of the University of Porto (Portugal)
an.ismar.cnr.it (f[dot]grati[at]an[dot]ismar[dot]cnr[dot]it)