The aim of this website is to provide most updated and recent information on the state of the herring stocks of the world and some general biological information on this important genus. Data will be provided by scientists working on the assessment and biology of herring, and by other interested contributors. We are permantently looking for more contributors! The site will therefore be continuously under construction. At present, however, it is at a very premature state. We apologize for that.

The specific scope of this website is to compile information and data for herring researchers, managers, journalists and interested public and to make them easily available. Herring is probably the best-investigated fish species in the world, which makes it interesting even for a wider public.

Later, when more advanced, the clupe@.de site is supposed to provide a communication platform for herring researchers and assessment scientists. In addition you will find announcements for symposia, abstracts of scientific contributions and recently published papers. A methodological section (research) will describe relevant research and assessment methods.

In a first step, information will be available only on European herring stocks (North-East Atlantic, North Sea, Baltic), assessed within the ICES environment (International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, in Copenhagen). These are official and agreed data which are available for the public from different sources.

Click here to see which data should be available for each stock. Please note that most of the data are not commented and may me misleading for non-experts. It is therefore highly recommended that you contact the specialists for the different stocks before using any of the data.

Some of the data, further evaluations and processed data, and most actual assessments which are not yet agreed may be presented in a "members" section. This part is accessible only with a password. It can also be used for the exchange of information between partners of international projects or studies. Short descriptions of projects dealing with herring are available in this section for the public.

The idea to create a website like this was born at the HERRING2000 conference, held in Anchorage, Alaska in February 2000. It was noted that herring stocks in different regions showed remarkably similar stock dynamics over the course of the last 4 centuries, and that an easy access to the most characteristic parameters describing the state of the stocks would be very useful to understand the fluctuations driven by natural phenomena and fisheries impact. This would significantly support the development of appropriate management models.