A user-friendly tool to assess management plans for European eel fishery and conservation

The European eel Regulation EC 1100/2007 establishes measures to recover the European eel stock. The Regulation requires Member States to guarantee a spawner escapement 40% of pristine levels by reducing eel mortality. The complexity and plasticity of eel life history make it difficult to assess the effectiveness of alternative management options, and tools allowing decision makers and fishermen to quickly assess the effectiveness of proposed management scenarios are urgently needed. We used stateof-the-art knowledge to develop a user-friendly simulation software allowing users to evaluate if current management policies meet the conservation target and evaluate the expected performances (spawner escapement and fishing yield) of alternative management scenarios. The software relies upon a demographic model explicitly accounting for the most relevant features of eel demography and has default settings for specific geographical areas and water systems. We demonstrate the software by exploring a variety of management plans in three European water systems. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Software availability Name of software: Eel Management Software Developer: Marcello Schiavina Availability and documentation: software and user guide freely available for online use at www.eelmanagement.eu Year first available: 2012 Software required: any internet browser supporting JavaScript Programming languages: HTML, PHP, JavaScript and MATLAB