Presentation of the research group

The "Instituto Español de Oceanografía" (IEO) is the advisory institution of the spanish administration in terms of fishing. Furthermore, the IEO is the national representative on international advisory organizations such as the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) where assessment of fishery resources relevant for European fleets, which work in the Northeast Atlantic, are carried out and management proposals are developed to ensure the sustainable exploitation of these resources. Achieve this sustainability requires a deep knowledge of the ecology and biology of the exploited and non target species, as well as the development of effective assessment and management models and tools, which entails intense research activity linked to the advisory activity carried out by the IEO. To this end, the IEO created the MERVEX research group in 2012. MERVEX is therefore a relatively new group that supports the IEO's traditional advisory activity through an integrated research of fisheries. MERVEX integrates researchers from the Oceanographic Centers of Santander, A Coruña, Vigo and Cádiz to cover all the fisheries of interest to Spain in waters of the Northeast Atlantic in the ICES area. Although given the importance of fishing activity in Galicia, the Galician Oceanographic Centers are the ones that provide the most researchers and the only ones considered in this proposal (GRC MERVEX, nº IN607A 2022/04).
The main challenge of MERVEX in this research expansion process is to combine it with the advisory task. To this end, MERVEX researchers have been involved in different national and international projects (see list of publications) without leaving the essential advisory task that allows us to carry out sector research with a fundamental immediate social impact in an area highly dependent on fishing, such as Galicia.