Fish mortality reporting in aquaculture : EIR release

FOI reference: FOI/18/00711
Date received: 7 March 2018
Date responded: 5 April 2018

Information requested

1. Information relating to the 'agreement' between farmed salmon producers in Scotland the Marine Scotland Science's Fish Health Inspectorate to report mortalities.

2. Copies of the "mortality database" referred to in scientific papers referenced in your request.

3. Copies of the assessment and the "data set containing comparable data representing the whole Scottish farmed Atlantic salmon industry", also referred to in scientific papers referenced in your request.

4. Copies of the "historical data" provided by SEPA and the "Excel spreadsheet (Microsoft Corp. 2010) containing 12007 production months for all of the 372 producing farms in Scotland", also referred to in scientific papers referenced in your request.

5. Pdf copies of the following papers –

• Soares, S., Green, D.M., Turnbull, J.F., Crumlish, M., Murray, A.G., 2011. A baseline method for benchmarking mortality losses in Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) production. Aquaculture 314, 7–12.

• Soares, S., Murray, A.G., Crumlish, M., Turnbull, J.F., Green, D.M., 2012. Evaluating abnormal mortality as an indicator of disease presence in the Atlantic salmon industry using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC). Aquaculture 370–371, 136–143.

• Soares, S., Murray, A.G., Crumlish, M., Turnbull, J.F., Green, D.M., 2013. Factors affecting variation in mortality of marine Atlantic salmon Salmo salar in Scotland. Dis. Aquat. Org. 103, 101–109.

Response

As the information you have requested is 'environmental information' for the purposes of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs), we are required to deal with your request under those Regulations. We are applying the exemption at section 39(2) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA), so that we do not also have to deal with your request under FOISA.

This exemption is subject to the 'public interest test'. Therefore, taking account of all the circumstances of this case, we have considered if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exemption, because there is no public interest in dealing with the same request under two different regimes. This is essentially a technical point and has no material effect on the outcome of your request.

1. Information relating to the 'agreement' between farmed salmon producers in Scotland the Marine Scotland Science's Fish Health Inspectorate to report mortalities.

The detail of the agreement is publicly available and is presented within the relevant sections of the Code of Good Practice for Scottish Finfish Aquaculture - http://scottishsalmon.co.uk/cogp/.

2. Copies of the "mortality database" referred to in scientific papers referenced in your request.

Please find attached mortality data used to develop the scientific papers to which you refer.

3. Copies of the assessment and the "data set containing comparable data representing the whole Scottish farmed Atlantic salmon industry", also referred to in scientific papers referenced in your request.

The assessment is described within the paper. The comparable element refers to the change in biomass on site between the months of reporting – this is described within the methods section of the paper. The data are available at the following link http://aquaculture.scotland.gov.uk/data/fish_farms_monthly_biomass_and_treatment_reports.aspx.

4. Copies of the "historical data" provided by SEPA and the "Excel spreadsheet (Microsoft Corp. 2010) containing 12007 production months for all of the 372 producing farms in Scotland", also referred to in scientific papers referenced in your request.

Again these "historical data" are freely available from the above link. The process of cleansing the data to remove erroneous entries is described within the paper.

5. PDF copies of scientific papers

The papers to which you refer are published and are available to download from the journal websites. You may also approach your local public library who can help you get copies of these papers.

Under regulation 6(1)(b) of the EIRs, we do not have to give you information that is already publicly available and easily accessible to you in another form or format.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses

foi-18-00711 - Copy of Database.xls

File type

Excel document

File size

5.8 MB