Where did the vessels go? An analysis of the EU fishing fleet gravitation between home ports, fishing grounds, landing ports and markets.

The mobile nature of fishing activity entails dynamic spatial relations and dependencies between coastal communities and fishing grounds drawn by the movement of fishing vessels. Analysing these spatial relations is essential to allocate the socio-economic impact of the fishing activity into the relevant coastal communities. In addition, such spatial information gives the possibility, on the one hand, to assess the impacts from fisheries on the marine environment and, on the other, to manage competing uses of the sea space between different activities.

Mapping Fishing Effort through AIS Data.

Several research initiatives have been undertaken to map fishing effort at high spatial resolution using the Vessel Monitoring System (VMS). An alternative to the VMS is represented by the Automatic Identification System (AIS), which in the EU became compulsory in May 2014 for all fishing vessels of length above 15 meters. The aim of this paper is to assess the uptake of the AIS in the EU fishing fleet and the feasibility of producing a map of fishing effort with high spatial and temporal resolution at European scale.