Our Local Focus Groups (LFGs) represent the grassroots, implementation-oriented end of Clean Catch. With a crucial foothold in fishing communities, their role is to provide local expert advice and guidance on Clean Catch’s activities, especially our bycatch monitoring and mitigation trials. The expertise and experience of our LFG members will be critical to ensuring that results and learning from the trials can be used to scale-up implementation of effective and practical bycatch monitoring and mitigation.
Meetings are arranged to coincide with key project stages where local input is critical and/or there are results or updates to share and discuss. The meetings are scheduled and designed to maximise participation by local fishermen. Reports from the meetings are available via our resource library.
At present, the Cornwall LFG – formerly known as the Cetacean LFG – is active. A second LFG will be established in 2025 in the locality where we will establish our second bycatch monitoring and mitigation trial.
Clean Catch was also formerly supported by the Spurdog LFG, which now sits outside our programme. For more information about spurdog management in the UK, contact spurdogalerts@cefas.gov.uk.