Who are CFRN?
The Canadian Fisheries Research Network (CFRN) is a collaboration of academic researchers, fishing industry, government researchers and fishery managers from across Canada funded under the National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). The Network includes over 30 academics from 15 universities working closely with representatives of fishing fleets from Canada’s Atlantic, Pacific and freshwater fisheries and with Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO). The partnership is industry-driven and built around projects that involve the active collaboration of each sector.
How does CFRN’s work relate to GAP2?
If you would replace the words CFRN with GAP2 and Canada with EU in the above paragraph, you would see that the CFRN ambitions are very similar to the GAP2 ambitions. Because we want to facilitate and promote learning from other situations, we have requested and obtained funding from the GAP2 exchange programme to organize a networking meeting between the Canadian and European participatory fisheries research networks.
Activity
We plan to organise two major events to bring our two projects together. First there will be an EU delegation of fishermen and researchers travelling to Canada in late April, early May 2013 either at the Huntsman Marine Science Centre or the St. Andrews Biological Station. The lobster fishery is active at that time. The academic home of the Lobster Node (on of the CFRN case studies) is nearby in Saint John and one of the fishermen’s groups is based in St. Andrews. The workshop will focus on exchanging best-practices for participatory research including on-deck protocols, quality control, knowledge assimilation and linking knowledge to policy. The workshop will involve at least one sea going trip.
The second event will be the visit of Canadian fishermen, researchers and policy-makers to the GAP2 network meeting in late June 2013 that will be held in Amsterdam just prior to the MARE People and the Sea conference. During this event we hope to show some of the participatory research innovations in Europe and share lessons from GAP2 and CFRN networks in the MARE conference.
What’s Next?
In preparation to the two events, I will be attending the CFRN Annual Meeting in Toronto, Canada from 13-15 February 2013. An update of that event will be provided on the GAP2 website and Facebook page – so stay tuned!
