Baseline surveys of wild fish catches

Through a major new project called ”baseline surveys”, NIFES is in the process of determining the background values of undesirable components in the main commercial fish species in Norway. The information provided by identifying the presence of undesirables in wild fish from Norwegian waters will be of fundamental importance for risk assessments in the area of seafood.

The content of undesirable substances in catches of wild fish varies between the species and from fish to fish and also depends on their access to food and the time of year. Until now, monitoring has been based on random sampling, but new knowledge has shown that this is not sufficient. Through its baseline project, NIFES has therefore started systematically identifying the presence of undesirable substances in commercial fish reserves in Norwegian waters.

This will give us a good picture of the level of undesirable components in the fish species and enable us to determine what level of monitoring is required for the individual species. It will indicate how often samples of the individual species should be taken, what undesirable substances we should be looking for in our analyses, and which geographical areas the samples should be taken from. NVG herring is the first species to have been examined, and work is well under way with mackerel and the Greenland halibut.  

Read more:

Facts about undesirables

Fact sheets:
   
What are environmental toxins and why are they found in seafood?