The ecosystem approach to fisheries (EAF) was introduced in 2001 with the Reykjavik Declaration on Responsible Fisheries in the Marine Ecosystem (Garcia et al., 2003). While the term was not used in the Reykjavik Declaration, organizations such as the International Council for Exploration of the Sea (ICES) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations adopted EAF for incorporating ecosystem considerations into fishery management. In 2002, the World Summit on Sustainable Development determined that the EAF should be implemented by 2010 (FAO, 2003, 2008, 2009). The term ecosystem-based management (EBM) was defined in the Ecosystem Principles Advisory Panel Report to the US Congress in 1998 (US EPAP, 1998). Steps toward actual implementation of the ecosystem approach followed much later (e.g. Fulton et al., 2019; Townsend et al., 2019; Bastardie et al., 2021; Ramírez-Monsalve et al., 2021; EU, 2022a). Over the years, the management of ecosystems and fisheries has been included in the context of slightly different formulations of Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries (EAF, Garcia et al., 2003), Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management (EAFM, EU, 2022a), Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management (EBFM, Craig and Link, 2023), Ecosystem Based Management (EBM, Link and Browman, 2014; Craig and Link, 2023). These formulations have some pronounced differences (Garcia et al., 2003), or describe different application levels of ecosystem management (Patrick and Link, 2015; Dolan et al., 2016); however, the multitude of similar terms creates linguistic uncertainty (Dolan et al., 2016) that might lead to confusion among stakeholders and the general public. The different types of fisheries management approaches (including Single Species fisheries management, SSFM) were addressed in EcoScope (Table 1). As EBM encompasses all other levels, further in this paper we refer to it.

Mapping of the legal base and the main policy players was one of the first tasks in EcoScope (Rodriguez-Perez et al., 2023). Several international acts are relevant to managing fisheries and ecosystems (Table 2). The identification of the EBM starts with the definition of relevant policy problems to be solved (FAO, 2003; Townsend et al., 2019, Table 3). A thorough knowledge of the existing legal and policy basis is a necessary prerequisite in this process (Tables 2, 3).

In the EU, the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP; EU, 1970) reformed in 2013 (CFP; EU, 2013; Tables 2, 3) provides directions that are relevant for the implementation of the ecosystem approach, in particular: the Technical Measures Regulation (EU, 2019a), the Data Collection Framework Regulation, (DCF; EU, 2017a), the Deep Sea Stocks in the North-east Atlantic Regulation (EU, 2016), and the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund Regulation (EMFF; EU, 2014a; Rodriguez-Perez et al., 2023). Unlike the CFP which aims to regulate the fisheries, the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD; EU, 2008; Table 2) aims to achieve Good Environmental Status (GES) through an ecosystem approach to the management of human activities, and therefore accentuates on keeping safe and healthy ecosystems and their services. Other EU regulations such as the Habitats Directive (HD, EU, 1992), the Water Framework Directive (WFD, EU, 2000), the Birds Directive (BD, EU, 2010), and the Maritime Spatial Planning Directive (MSPD, EU, 2014b), also emphasize nature protection and ecosystem management (Tables 2, 3). The EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030 (EU BS 2030; EU, 2020) is a core part of the European Green Deal (EU, 2019b; Table 3). A core commitment under the BS is the expansion of protected areas to cover 30% of the sea. For fisheries, it sets the targets to maintain or reduce fishing mortality to or under Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) levels; to eliminate or reduce bycatch, particularly for sea mammals, turtles, and birds; and to tackle practices that damage the seabed. The Nature Restoration Regulation (NRR, coming into force in mid-2026; EU, 2024), as a key element of the BS, aims to restore ecosystems, habitats, and species, to enable the long-term sustained recovery of biodiverse and resilient nature, and to achieve the EU’s climate mitigation and adaptation objectives. The General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean (GFCM) 2030 strategy (FAO, 2021) is binding for the Mediterranean and Black Sea member countries of the GFCM, and includes targets on achieving sustainable fisheries and aquaculture and constraining by-catch of Protected, Endangered, and Threatened Species (PETS).

In this paper, we aim to review the main issues with the state-of-the-art implementation of the EBM, and to share the EcoScope project experience on that matter. The main objective of EcoScope is to pilot the EBM implementation in European seas: the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, the Bay of Biscay, the Balearic Sea, the Adriatic Sea, the Black Sea, the Aegean Sea, and the Levantine Sea. In doing so, EcoScope provides building blocks to be used in assembling the necessary science, managerial, communication, and educational frameworks in Europe.

EBM needs copious data, and the issue of its scarcity has been raised on a number of occasions (Murawski, 2007; Patrick and Link, 2015; Heymans et al., 2020; Rodriguez-Perez et al., 2023). Data gaps were also found to be a significant barrier reducing the statistical and explanatory power, as well as the predictive ability of models needed in EBM (Heymans et al., 2020). Given the call for more and better data, EcoScope aimed to identify and fill gaps in biological, fisheries, ecological, and socio-economic knowledge across marine ecosystem components and models (Supplementary Material (SM), Abucay et al., 2023; Kesner-Reyes et al., 2025). A short description of the fisheries, ecological, and socio-economic data required for EBM and their deficiencies are presented in the SM.

Effective implementation of EBM requires it to be conceived and structured as an adaptive, iterative process that involves formulating policies and legislation, acquiring knowledge, developing and testing models, applying MMs, and conducting ongoing surveillance (Figure 1). The “pull-push” mechanism of demanding/providing EBM advice that currently exists in the EU cannot satisfy the needs for effective operational EBM (Ramírez-Monsalve et al., 2021). Successful operational EBM requires: 1) well-defined management objectives (Tables 3, 4); 2) a clear management process receptive to the evaluation of trade-offs; 3) a suite of well-documented state-of-the-art models; 4) early and iterative engagement among scientists, stakeholders, and managers; 5) a model development process and fusion of suitable models in a collaborative, interactive, and iterative interdisciplinary team; and 6) a rigorous and iterative review process involving independent reviewers, institutions, and stakeholders (Townsend et al., 2019; Craig and Link, 2023).

Monitoring the outcomes of implementation is critical for the effectiveness of the EBM process (Tallis et al., 2010). It involves designing and establishing monitoring programs that identify how the chosen management actions affect the management targets (Levin et al., 2009). Much of the data collected during the monitoring can be used in future EBM, allowing scientists and managers to move from data poor to data rich situations, improving the rigor and sophistication of their decisions with each iteration. When governance is stable and multiple agencies cooperate, an integrated, coordinated, and efficient monitoring program can be established across agencies. Under less ideal governance situations, where funding for monitoring is questionable or the maintenance of monitoring programs is unlikely, the monitoring program can be designed to target critical time frames or areas, or to take advantage of remote sensing. The interdisciplinary team, together with managers and stakeholders, would establish an adaptive management framework that includes existing monitoring plans. Monitoring and adaptive management plans would be integrated, and their efficiencies would be evaluated (Tallis et al., 2010).

Once the EBM process is operational, its components and subprocesses need constant iterative adaptive updating. Data collection, knowledge base, and models need to be improved and tailored through periodic workshops by interdisciplinary teams of scientists and managers. Models, recommendations, and advice need to be re-evaluated through a series of reviews at different levels (experts and stakeholders). Communication between modelers, managers, and stakeholders is essential, and would enable model and procedure refinement, and ensure their usefulness. Communication with stakeholders would enable scientists to respond to urgent and critical events by providing strategic and tactical advice for holistic planning and operational applications (Townsend et al., 2019).

To facilitate data preservation, sharing, and usage by interested stakeholders, the EcoScope consortium developed, and will maintain in the future, the EcoScope platform (https://data.ecoscopium.eu, Figure 2), which is a key output of the project. The EcoScope platform is a geographical information system that hosts meteorological, oceanographic, biogeochemical, environmental, biological, fishery, and socio-economic datasets, and homogenizes them into common standard types and formats following international protocols. The environmental data are both historical and forecasts, cover all study areas, and are assembled, compiled, and integrated from multiple external databases and platforms such as CMEMS, EMODnet, NOAA, ECMWF, SMHI, Sentinel 2 and 3, CORDEX, IPCC. These data are combined with data from biological (e.g., FishBase, SeaLifeBase) and fisheries databases providing data on biomass, catches, and discards (e.g. GFCM, ICES, FAO, Sea Around Us project), marine mammal distribution (ACCOBAMS), biodiversity (Marine IBA e-atlas), fish and invertebrate species distributions and observations (AquaMaps, OBIS, GBIF), and fishing effort (Global Fishing Watch). All data are homogenized, georeferenced and quality checked, and form the back-end of the Ecoscope Platform (https://ecoscopium.eu/ecoscope-platform). The EcoScope platform is a modular tool linking data with environmental and human drivers, indicators, and models that couples predictions of changes in marine biogeochemistry with ecosystem productivity within a framework of climate change and increased anthropogenic forcing. The platform is based on state-of-the-art methodologies and adopts an Agile approach to ingest the diverse datasets. A series of user stories was considered for designing and providing shared services required by the external stakeholders. This platform is expected to help European decision makers in the long-term management of fishery activities, addressing pressing challenges like climate change and fisheries economy constraints.

The EcoScope Toolbox features a comprehensive set of standardized fisheries, community, ecosystem, and climate indicators, integrated into two unified scoring indices (one for assessing the health of fisheries and another one for assessing ecosystem health (https://ecoscopium.eu/ecoscope-toolbox, Table 1). To align with EBM principles, the toolbox also incorporates some socio-economic indicators, available as time series and specific to ecosystems rather than countries. Where feasible, the individual indicators are connected to outputs from ecosystem models (EwE), stock assessments, and various datasets on oceanography, climate, environment, and fisheries available within the EcoScope platform. The scoring indices have been co-designed and evaluated by scientists and stakeholders to assist decision-making and EBM implementation. The toolbox can be applied anywhere in the world at various scales depending on the data and boundaries, and has a set of metrics that can be used independently to support international and local policies with the EBM.

In addition, the fisheries and ecosystem information and expertise are used to assess ecosystem status and change through the maritime spatial planning (MSP) challenge simulation platform (https://www.mspchallenge.info/msp-challenge-simulation-platform.html). The MSP Challenge simulation platform is an extension of the pre-existing software platform https://www.mspchallenge.info/ applying MEMs (EwE) and incorporating dynamic ecosystem and climate conditions under deep uncertainty. It aims to engage advisers, managers and other stakeholders to carry out robust decisions and to promote adaptive management in accordance with the EU and national policies and legislation (Nascimento et al., 2025).

The EcoScope academy is the educational pillar of the project and includes a collection of online self-paced chapters contained in a course entitled “Ecocentric fisheries management” (https://ecoscope.getlearnworlds.com). The academy is addressed to postgraduate and undergraduate students, young scientists, and policymakers, building up the required knowledge for understanding the complexity and the necessity of EBM. It is used to disseminate the methodological approach of EcoScope and to transfer knowledge to all relevant stakeholders, as well as to support the proper usage of the developed platform and decision-making toolbox, and to facilitate the development and implementation of EBM policies.

The EcoScope app (https://ecoscopium.eu/ecoscope-app) is designed to empower citizens to contribute to the preservation of marine ecosystems by reporting marine hazards such as fishing in protected areas, sightings of invasive species, or marine pollution incidents.). These reports are transmitted in real time to the relevant authorities, ensuring that each issue is promptly addressed and managed. This mechanism facilitates a continuous flow of valuable data from the field, enabling stakeholders to monitor and respond to critical challenges in marine conservation. By collecting and centralizing information from users across regions, the app helps create a more comprehensive picture of activities impacting the marine environment, such as the spread of invasive species and fishing practices in ecologically sensitive areas. These data are not only instrumental in shaping immediate actions, but also serve as a valuable resource for scientists, policymakers, and governments.

The EcoScope stakeholder knowledge exchange forum (KEF) aims to achieve maximum participation, advice, and support from key ecosystem-based fisheries stakeholders to ensure the tools are useful for them and meet their needs. It comprises all stakeholders that were identified as key EBM players in the initial stakeholder mapping, as well as the stakeholders that have actively signed up via https://ecoscopium.eu/stakeholders. The results from the first stakeholder workshop have been instrumental in understanding stakeholder needs, guiding the design of the tools, and ensuring they are fit for purpose. The last workshop will showcase the final tools to all stakeholders in the KEF, and we will collect further feedback and advice on future challenges for EBM, additional needs, and how to best develop the tools further.

The main objective of the EcoScope project is to help develop an efficient ecosystem-centered approach to fisheries management by providing the necessary data, tools, and communication media directly to users. With respect to this, the building of the EcoScope applications such as MEMs developed for the different sea basins and their availability for testing and use by stakeholders in the EcoScope platform, toolbox, and app were the project’s most essential outputs. This said, we can ask ourselves whether the achievements of the project are sufficient to help the implementation of EBM in Europe, and what problems and limitations we have encountered, that should be avoided in similar future efforts (Table 5).

The EcoScope project showed clear limitations (Table 4), some of which are inherent to the EBM process itself. One of them is the difficult communication of the EBM concept (Briguglio et al. 2025b). During the EcoScope survey (Rodriguez-Perez et al., 2023), stakeholders identified several barriers in implementing EBM: a lack of clarity of the EBM concept, including no common understanding of what the concept means; no guidelines on how EBM could work and be implemented; and no agreed definition, and therefore different interpretations, perceptions, and expectations among the various stakeholders. Policy and regulatory framework issues were also identified as a problem, including poor policy frameworks for EBM, insufficient inclusion of ecosystem aspects by decision makers, insufficient enforcement of regulations, and the complexity of different regulatory mechanisms in different countries. In addition, stakeholder communication issues were seen as a barrier in implementing EBM, including insufficient coordination, different mindsets, and a lack of common vision. Some of these problems can be traced back to the uncertainty in the formulation of the concepts (see Ch. 1), but others result from the mismatch between the environmental and fisheries regulations and advisory bodies with regard to EBM in the EU and elsewhere (Dolan et al., 2016; Ramírez-Monsalve et al., 2021). For example, the CFP deals mainly with fishing, and aims to sustain maximum yields, while the HD, MSFD, MSPD, and BD target environmental and biodiversity protection, and wider ecosystem management (e.g. achieving GES, setting protected zones and renewable energy projects). By trying to accommodate these diverging goals (creating perhaps impossible trade-offs), the EcoScope project (and possibly other similar efforts) is leaving the field of EBM and entering a wider field where it possibly lacks focus and sufficient expertise. The separation between environmental and fisheries regulations and advisory bodies was acknowledged by the EC, which proposed to address the harmonization of ocean policies in the new European Ocean Pact (EU, 2025).

It is clear that the EcoScope consortium’s communication with stakeholders is only indirect and therefore lacks the potential to acquire knowledge and contribute to management decisions interactively with the main actors. In future, project participants should be directly involved with the dedicated assessment and advice groups. Such involvement, however, needs to be authorized by the advisory administration in the EU, and future consortia must earn their place at the decision-making scene and gain the trust of the main actors responsible for the EBM implementation.

It is a considerable challenge to support the EcoScope products beyond the project’s life span. As mentioned in Ch. 5, operational EBM needs constant interactive updating of its policy plans, data collection and knowledge base. EcoScope aims to solve these problems by putting in place viable business models to ensure sustainable operation and update of its products and services in the future. The business models are aiming at future investments from private and public funds to ensure that the EcoScope platform, toolbox, app, and MSP challenge platform fulfill their tasks with the EBM implementation, stakeholder communication, and education.

The geographical scope of EcoScope includes eight sea basins, which have very different ecosystem, fisheries, and management properties. Although the project consortium tried to cover all areas equally, it was not possible to apply all analyses everywhere. SSM assessments and some of the MEM applications (EwE) were carried out in all areas, but others such as socio-economic value chain models were applied only to the Israeli and Balearic Islands cases, and the MSP Challenge simulations – only to the eastern Mediterranean and western Baltic Sea (Nascimento et al., 2025).

The complex nature and bulk quantity of data and tools needed make the development of EBM challenging and expensive. Data collection, identification, and filling of data gaps are essential for EBM development. Nevertheless, a shortage of certain data cannot be the reason to side step the ecosystem approach. When data are missing, modeling, scenario development, and plausible assumptions could be used to fill the gaps and to take on board ecosystem considerations.

The EcoScope project developed modules ready to be used in the EBM implementation in Europe. We feel, however, that a more direct approach should be taken by the responsible organizations, such as the European Commission and the agencies that advise the EC (ICES, GFCM), to explicitly define and set formal research and managerial frameworks for implementing and coordinating EBM activities. To do so, they need to actively communicate with key stakeholders such as the fishing industry, environmentalists, scientists, and advisors, and further develop the legal and institutional background (e.g. by adding to and/or revising the CFP and MSFD, and others) of EBM.

EBM needs a large and complex suite of concepts and tools to deal with a variety of problems ranging from climate change, through various forms of water pollution, to biological trophic interactions and social-economic sustainability. Despite certain criticisms that have been raised due to slow and sometimes badly coordinated approaches, lack of conceptual clarity, insufficient data, complex methodology, and lack of efficient communication, EBM has been developing and evolving toward operational implementation. To paraphrase W.S. Churchill’s famous quote (https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form-of-government) about democracy: EBM is probably not the most efficient form of management for fisheries or the ecosystem; however, we have no alternative but to maintain our ecosystems healthy and productive in order to be able to use them sustainably.