Final Report for the ICES Science Fund

RICARDO AMOROSO; ANA PARMA; MARIANA MAZZINI; MARIA EVA GONGORA; GASTON TROBBIANI; ALEJO J. IRIGOYEN; SÁNCHEZ-CARNERO, NOELA; ADRIAN MORALES

2015-03-25/2015-03-28

1-11

Biológica

Produccion animal-Pesca

The project fulfilled most of the objectives set out in the ICES Science Fund application. In particular, the project was instrumental to collect process and analyse trawling fisheries data at four large and productive areas of the world: North Benguela Current, South Benguela Current, East Agulhas Current and the Patagonian Shelf. In concert with the data gathered by the project ?Trawling Best Practices?, we were able to compile the most comprehensive database of trawling intensity in the world (Figure 1). The contribution of this project to the global database was substantial, allowing us to incorporate datasets from developing countries from the southern hemisphere.The project contemplated three main activities: a meeting with experts in VMS (Vessels Monitoring System) data analysis and two regional training workshops with local experts from Argentina, South Africa and Namibia. Unfortunately, there was no opportunity to hold a similar meeting in South East Asia, although we have built communications so that this may be a future possibility. The first stage of the project was devoted to develop a series of routines in R to read, process, analyse and visualize spatial fisheries data. The regional training workshops served multiple goals: local scientists were able to learn new skills and the project benefited from their knowledge of the local fisheries for an accurate interpretation of the data sets. Despite the fact that each local workshop was tailored to the local types and structure of the data, and the programming level of the participants, we were able to achieve similar results. Below we highlight and illustrate the main results of this project:1- High-resolution mapping: we were able to develop high-resolution maps (1 km2 grid) of fishing intensity in four large regions of the world (Figure 2-5). Fishing was highly aggregated, with most of the areas being un-trawled or trawled very lightly. In the case of Argentina, where some large no-take zones are in place, most of the fishing effort was concentrated outside the reserves.2- Changes in the perception of the footprint with the grid resolution: we were able to show that the scale of the analysis may distort the estimate of the footprint (Figure 6) when fishing data are aggregated in large, low-resolution grids.