NIOZ High Tide Balgzand Fisheries Program 1974-present

The NIOZ HW fishing programme started with the PhD project of Bouwe Kuipers on the ecology of juvenile plaice Pleuronectes platessa L. in the western Wadden Sea in the beginning of the 1970s. Within the framework of this PhD project, shallow subtidal and intertidal areas were sampled and for this, a commercial fishing gear for catching adult flatfish, a Dutch beam trawl, was downscaled to a 2 m beam trawl that could be handled and towed with small rubber dinghies by a single or by 2 persons. This 2 m beam trawl showed to be highly efficient in catching juvenile plaice and other epibenthic species. Most of the work on juvenile plaice was carried out at Balgzand, a large (~50 km2) intertidal area in the western Dutch Wadden Sea. Starting with sampling squares, within a few years sampling changed into a system of 9 transects each consisting of 4 hauls. Over the last 35 years, regular biweekly to monthly surveys have been carried in more than 20 years.