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

• Main Authors: Steven Holmes, Fabrizio Natale, Maurizio Gibin, Jordi Guillen, Alfredo Alessandrini, Michele Vespe, Giacomo Chato Osio
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2020-01-01
• Series: PLoS ONE
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230494

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. In this paper, we use AIS data, which is individual vessels' positioning data, to examine the activity of the EU large-scale fishing fleets, their home ports, high intensity fishing areas (i.e., main fishing grounds), main ports and coastal communities involved.