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The Celtic Sea Trout Project

The Celtic Sea Trout Project aims to:

  • To understand and describe sea trout stocks in the Irish Sea and thereby to enhance sea trout fisheries and strengthen their contributions to quality of life, to rural economies and to national biodiversity.
  • To explore the use of sea trout life history variation as a tool to detect and understand the effects of climate change.

There are major unanswered questions in the understanding of sea trout, namely:

  • where do they go at sea and how are their stocks structured and interlinked?
  • what is their marine ecology (feeding, growth, survival and life history variation)?
  • what environmental and other pressures are they exposed to?
  • how do their life histories (and thus fishery quality) respond to environmental variation?

Sea trout fisheries in parts of Western Britain, including the Irish Sea, are suffering decline; but the pattern is mixed and in most cases the causes of change and thus the solutions are poorly understood. So we need answers to the question outlined above.

The CSTP intends to provide this missing knowledge and to translate it into fishery and conservation benefits for countries bordering the Irish Sea.