Working Group on Nephrops Surveys (WGNEPS; outputs from 2022 meeting)

The Working Group on Nephrops Surveys (WGNEPS) is the international coordination group for Nephrops underwater television and trawl surveys within ICES. This report summarizes the na-tional contributions on the results of the surveys conducted in 2022 together with time series covering all survey years, problems encountered, data quality checks and technological improve-ments as well as the planning for survey activities for 2023. In total, 21 surveys covering 26 functional units (FU's) in the ICES area and 1 geographical sub-area (GSA) in the Adriatic Sea were discussed and further improvements in respect to survey design and data analysis standardization and the use of most recent technology were reviewed. The first exploratory UWTV survey on the FU 25 Nephrops grounds was also presented to the group. The results of the evaluation of reference sets for FU3&4 Skagerrak/Kattegat were accepted fol-lowing the process set down by the 2018 workshop (WKNEPS). An alternative method estimate Nephrops abundance was shown to the group using the recently published R package sdmTMB. The group agreed to hold a workshop in 2025 to address burrow size estimations to update cor-rection factors and terms of reference for this to be agreed at next meeting. Automatic burrow detection based on deep learning methods continues to show promising re-sults where datasets from multiple institutes were used. Plans are being progressed for an international Nephrops UWTV database to be established at the ICES data centre with a sub-group.