Visual impact assessment of small dock & piers: Theory and practice

From a manager’s perspective, oftentimes the publicly held concerns related to small docks and piers are not really related to the environment. They may be more related to visual impacts and aesthetic concerns, a sense of over-development of the shore, or simply change. While individuals may hold personal aesthetic values related to small docks in general or an individual structure in particular, techniques have evolved that appear to provide reproducible, predictive assessments of the visual impacts and aesthetic values of an area and how those might change with development, including an increase in numbers of small docks. These assessments may be used to develop regulatory or non-regulatory methods for the management of small docks based on state or community standards. Visual impact assessments are increasingly used in the regulatory review of proposed development—although this process is still in its infancy as regards small docks and piers. Some political jurisdictions have established visual impact or aesthetic standards as relate to docks and others are in the process of investigating how to go about such an effort. (PDF contains 42 pages)

Kritische Betrachtung der Begriffe Fischereiaufwand und Fangkraft mit dem Ansatz einer Neubewertung

In order to restore the balance between available fish res-sources and catch capacities in the marine waters of the EU, the European Commission has introduced so-called Multiannual Guidance Programmes (MAGPs) within the frame work of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). However, the non-quantified relation between fishing effort and fishing power of a vessel has proved to be one of the most difficult problems. The present contribution suggests to substitute traditional but non-quantifying methods by including the real catch results into the models.