Deriving Fishing Monthly Effort and Caught Species from Vessel Trajectories

Vessel Monitoring Systems (VMSs) are mainly meant to monitor and control fishing activity in ocean areas. VMSs have been realized and used in many ways, their principal aim being the monitoring, controlling and surveillance of fishing activity. The term VMS may refer to electronic or software systems aiming at those scopes. VMSs often rely on information transmitted by vessels during navigation, which are used both by security systems in ports and by scientists who want to extract information about oceans fishing exploitation. In this paper we present a semi-automatic method, to be used in a VMS, to calculate fishing monthly effort in ocean areas during a certain period. The method is based on a collection of vessels trajectories referring to that specific period. The monthly effort is calculated at 0.5 degrees resolution and is displayed on an interactive GIS map. Furthermore, the method produces a list of species that are likely to live in the most exploited areas. Thus, our method can be integrated by a VMS to understand the degree of exploitation of ocean areas and to estimate the species that are involved in a catch, which can help in limiting destructive fishing practices.