Off the wire
• S. Africa to use WEF to attract foreign investment: Zuma  • Roundup: Mali gov't differs with experts on reduction of UN peacekeepers  • Man jailed for 13 years for raping stepdaughter  • China urges Japan not to distort facts about Diaoyu Islands  • Roundup: Pakistan Stock Exchange's bearish run enters 10th day  • China says Security Council resolution should not stir confrontation  • Chinese police break cross-border drug dealing chain  • China Voice: China sincere, responsible in pushing ties with Arab world  • Pakistan forms committee to oversee China-Pakistan Economic Corridor project  • Spain's inflation rate shows no change in 2015  
You are here: 　 Home

EU develops new tool to map fishing activities in Europe

Xinhua, January 15, 2016 Adjust font size:

The Joint Research Center (JRC), the European Commission's in-house science service, said in a press release that it has developed a new tool that provides detailed maps of high intensity fisheries areas in 2014-2015 in Europe for the first time.

Thanks to tracking data of fishing vessels, it is possible to derive information about the fishing habits of coastal communities and to know, for example, which are the areas where they fish more frequently, said the press release.

This information is crucial to tailor policy and management strategies to boost blue growth, the EU strategy for a more profitable and sustainable exploitation of marine and maritime resources, added the press release.

The new tool, Mapping Fishing Activities (MFA), uses for the first time tracking data from the Automatic Identification System (AIS), which is used worldwide to identify and locate vessels through data exchange with other nearby ships, AIS base stations and satellites, to analyze the relations between fishing communities and fishing areas at high level of geographical detail at EU-wide scale.

The data used in this tool consists of around 150 million positions from EU fishing vessels above 15 meters in length in the period between September 2014 and September 2015.

Until recently, such analyses have been based on highly aggregated figures from administrative sources such as the logbooks and the Vessel Monitoring System (VMS), which have been introduced to control fishing, said the press release.

However, the MFA relies on open source data from the AIS which, while not suitable for a systematic control of potentially illegal fishing, is more accessible and offers new possibilities for research, said the press release. Endit