Leveraging vessel traffic data and a temporary fishing closure to inform marine management

Abstract

The benefits of protected areas depend on compliance, and achieving protection remains a challenge in intensely used areas where conservation and socioeconomic goals are in real or apparent conflict. One recent innovation – satellite tracking of commercial fishing vessels – has been introduced to help with ocean protection initiatives and build trust between fishers and managers. We paired vessel traffic data before and during a temporary closure in the Adriatic Sea with data on fish nursery habitat to examine changes in fishing effort and their potential consequences. Trawlers generally complied with the closure but maintained overall effort by trawling more intensely outside of the no‐trawl zone, especially near its borders and closer to shore. We detected stronger than expected fishing effort in a sub‐region within the protected area, suggesting that this location should be closely monitored for compliance. Notably, fishing effort was relocated to nursery grounds for some exploited species, illustrating the importance of understanding species’ life histories and habitat distribution in the design of protected areas.

Interactions Between a Large Marine Protected Area, Pelagic Tuna and Associated Fisheries

“…Another expectation is that displaced fishers will simply "fish the line" (Kellner et al, 2007) and concentrate along the borders of MPA to exploit biomass spillover (Roberts et al, 2001). Recent studies using satellite-based vessel position data from Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) has shown purse seine vessels fishing on the edge of the Galápagos reserve boundary (Boerder et al, 2017), and bottom trawlers fishing around a large fisheries restricted area in the Adriatic Sea (Elahi et al, 2018). Our spatial effort data were too aggregated and coarse to deduce whether the remaining effort was "fishing the line" around BIOT, and AIS data are only available in the Indian Ocean since 2012.…”

Exploring uses of maritime surveillance data for marine spatial planning: A review of scientific literature

“…As a result, occurrences of Activities keywords mostly arise from more sectoral based data such as AIS and VMS. VMS data are used to a smaller but still considerable extent, to support fisheries management [44] or to assess the carry-over induced by marine protected areas [78] of offshore windfarms implementation [28] for instance. VMS strengths (metadata and coverage of the fishing fleet) are still probably being hampered by its low accessibility.…”

A Scientific Synthesis of Marine Protected Areas in the United States: Status and Recommendations

“…Significant recent effort focuses on understanding how technology can improve MPA outcomes, such as use of satellite data and analytics for MPA monitoring and enforcement (Witkin et al, 2016;Elahi et al, 2018;Bradley et al, 2019;White et al, 2020;Cavanaugh et al, 2021), eDNA for biodiversity monitoring and enforcement (Gold et al, 2021;Willette et al, 2021), Autonomous Underwater Vehicles for biodiversity assessments (Ferrari et al, 2018), and improved seafloor mapping techniques (Wölfl et al, 2019). These technological innovations are advancing MPA research and management at an unprecedented pace.…”