University of Tasmania
Browse
146270 - Estimating fishing effort and spatio-temporal distribution of longline vessels in the Indian Ocean.pdf (2.9 MB)

Estimating fishing effort and spatio-temporal distribution of longline vessels in the Indian Ocean

Download (2.9 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-21, 01:56 authored by Utama, FW, Hoenner, X, Britta Hardesty, Peel, D, Ford, JH, Vanessa AdamsVanessa Adams, Chris Wilcox
Protein from fish is essential for feeding the world’s population and is increasingly recognized as critical for food security. To ensure that fisheries resources can be sustainably maintained, fisheries management must be appropriately implemented. When logbook and landing records data are not complete or are incorrect, it is challenging to have an accurate understanding of catch volume. Focusing on Indonesian longline vessels operating in the Indian Ocean from 2012–2019 (n = 1124 vessels), our aims were to (1) assess compliance through identification of landing sites and potentially illicit behavior inferred by interruptions in VMS transmission, and (2) understand how the fishery operates along with quantifying the spatio-temporal distribution of fishing intensity by applying a Hidden Markov Model, which automatically classified each VMS position as fishing, steaming and anchoring. We found vessel compliance gaps in 90% of vessels in the dataset. Compliance was questionable due both to the widespread occurrence of long intermissions in relaying VMS positions (mean = 17.8 h, n = 973 vessels) and the use of unauthorized landing sites. We also observed substantial changes in fishing effort locations among years. The introduction of regulatory measures during the study period banning transshipment and foreign vessels may be responsible for the spatial shift in fishing activity we observed, from encompassing nearly the whole Indian Ocean to more recent intense efforts off western Sumatra and northern Australia.

History

Publication title

Frontiers in Marine Science

Volume

8

Article number

671036

Number

671036

Pagination

1-11

ISSN

2296-7745

Department/School

School of Social Sciences

Publisher

Frontiers Research Foundation

Place of publication

Switzerland

Rights statement

Copyright © 2021 Utama, Hoenner, Hardesty, Peel, Ford, Adams and Wilcox. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Repository Status

  • Open

Socio-economic Objectives

Marine biodiversity

Usage metrics

    University Of Tasmania

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC