20 years of work on Marine Recreational Fisheries at the Thünen Institute of Baltic Sea Fisheries

Following the advice of the 2014 evaluation of the Thünen Institute by the German Science and Humanities Council, the Thünen Institute has started to encourage its working groups to be evaluated by external experts as part of its quality management. The Marine Recreational Fisheries Working Group of the Thünen Institute of Baltic Sea Fisheries was selected to undergo this evaluation process. Two external scientific experts on recreational fisheries, Dr. Kieran Hyder (CEFAS, UK) and Prof. Dr. Warren Potts (Rhodes University, SA) were requested to evaluate the working group based on the following terms of references: (i) Quality assessment and technical evaluation of the recreational fisheries survey and monitoring programme run by the working group; (ii) Evaluation of the scientific excellence in terms of methods used, technical expertise of the staff and scientific and popular science outputs; (iii) Evaluation of research priorities with focus on their effectiveness and usefulness for the advisory competence of the Thünen institute; (iv) Evaluation of national and international research collaborations and participation in national and international scientific committees and advisory boards. The evaluation was conducted as a face-to-face workshop at the Thünen Institute of Baltic Sea Fisheries in Rostock, Germany in November 2022. This report served to familiarize the evaluators with the Thünen Institute and the work of the Marine Recreational Fisheries Working Group in the past 20 years. It contains detailed information on the genesis and development of the working group, the research and monitoring activities, the technical expertise of the group members, the scientific and popular science results, the advisory competencies and the national and international networking of the group. The evaluation was concluded with a summary statement by the two evaluators (see Appendix 2), which includes an assessment of the current work and recommendations for future areas of development.