Mapping EU fishing activities using ship tracking data

Information and understanding of fishing activities at sea is a fundamental component of marine knowledge and maritime situational awareness. Such information is important to fisheries science, public authorities and policy makers. In this paper we introduce a first map at European scale of EU fishing activities extracted using Automatic Identification System (AIS) ship tracking data. The resulting map is a density of points that identify fishing activities. A measure of the reliability of such information is also presented as a map of coverage reception capabilities. Introduction Mapping fishing activities at sea has been investigated using data from different ship tracking systems. Amongst them, terrestrial networks of Automatic Identification System (AIS) receivers offer the possibility to track vessels independently of their flag, at wide scale. Conceived primarily as a collision avoidance and vessel monitoring tool, AIS is becoming a cornerstone of safety of navigation. In addition, it is becoming progressively used to improve Maritime Situational Awareness to detect ship’s behaviour anomalies and project the current situation into the future (Pallotta et al., 2013). Historical AIS data have been proved effective in mapping merchant routes (Fernandez et al., 2014) and other activities such as off-shore, research and exploration etc. (Vespe et al., 2015). In Europe (EU Dir 2011/15/EU), even fishing vessels down to 15 m in length are required to be fitted with AIS, and this has a significant impact in understanding the spatial distribution of fishing efforts (e.g., Natale et al., 2015a, and Mazzarella et al., 2014) and the economics of the EU fisheries sector (Natale et al., 2015b). The knowledge of fishing activities is not only fundamental for fisheries science, but it is also a key element for policy makers, e.g. in planning activities at sea (Maritime Spatial Planning) or in assessing the impact of introducing new Marine Protected Areas. Following the findings reported in (Natale et al., 2015a), the paper introduces for the first time an aggregated and anonymised map of EU fishing activities at European scale. The map is produced by processing AIS historical data in the period September 2014 to September 2015. A spatial coverage of the data is also computed after aggregating the data from multiple providers in order to give an estimate of the reliability of the results in the different areas.