Improving monitoring, control and surveillance efforts through vessel tracking and fishery dependent data

Abstract

Fisheries are amongst the most extractive and damaging activities impacting the marine environment. To control and promote the sustainability of these activities, different laws and regulations were established. Yet, Illegal, Unregulated and Unreported (IUU) fishing activities are still present to these days and are one of the most threatening problems affecting marine life.

To improve the effectiveness of fishing control and surveillance efforts, risk assessment approaches have been proposed to detect risk units with higher probability of illegal actions, such as vessels, seasons or regions, to which control efforts should be given priority.

Vessel tracking and fishery dependent data have already proved their potential for gathering important information regarding different aspects of fishing activities, such as species distributions or the estimation of fishing effort. Yet, their usefulness for improving monitoring, control and surveillance efforts has not been fully exploited.

Here, we investigate how these two types of data can provide important intelligence, within a risk assessment approach, to identify risk units that have higher probability of failing with landing requirements and how such information can be used to improve fisheries’ monitor, control and surveillance efforts.

Our approach is able to identify fishing vessels with higher tendency for not reporting their catches. We saw that a small fraction of fishing vessels are responsible for the majority of unreported landings and that unreported landing events tend to less frequent during the Summer. We also noticed that price variation of sold catches correlates with unreported landing events, which might indicate that it is one of the drivers affecting the seasonality of unreported landing events.

Such information is crucial when planning control and enforcement actions, which should focus on those with a higher tendency to act incompliantly and during the periods when this sort of behaviour is more frequent. By following this approach, such effort become more cost effective, which will strengthen the governance of the marine realm.