Preliminary analysis of the fishing activity in Portugal

Abstract

Despite more than 3000 national fishing vessels land daily in Portuguese waters, the fishing activity and the spatial-temporal patterns of this fleet are still poorly characterised and documented. This poses some difficulties to a rational approach for maritime operation planning, control, monitoring, safety and security of the fishing activity. This paper conducts a preliminary analysis of the fishing activity in Portugal. First, the most used fishing gears and a portrait of the Portuguese licensed fishing fleet are presented. Current monitoring systems used to support control and surveillance tasks are described and their limitations discussed. The trajectories of fishing vessels in a selected area are then analysed using Automatic Identi-fication System data. The vessels’ trajectories are grouped by practiced fishing gear and a preliminary characterization of the phases and of the motion patterns per group is conducted