Assessing the impact of potential spatial closure on Basque fisheries: a high resolution analysis of landings and revenues.
Supervisors: María Mateo, Estanis Mugerza (AZTI):
Marine spaces serve diverse human needs which require an integrated Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) to avoid conflicts while developing such activities, but also to ensure the conservation and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystem services they provide. With this purpose, Sites of Community Importance (SCI) contribute to the maintenance and restoration of habitats and to the coherence of the Natura 2000 network. Within the European framework regulation (EC 2021/1139) establishing that, by 2030, Member States must protect and effectively manage 30% of marine and land surface, the Spanish Government proposed multiple regions to consider as SCI. This list includes the Jaizkibel-Capbreton area, located in the Bay of Biscay. Integration of SCI areas into MSP could have direct impact on fishing activity, in case of spatio-temporal closure. Fishing is economically and socially of great importance in the Bay of Biscay, focusing their activity in certain areas and catching a large variety of species, exploited by a wide range of fishing gears. Therefore, understanding the dependency of fishers on specific areas is crucial to identify main fishing grounds and the spatial patterns of fishing, providing information for effective spatial management. In this study, different sources of fisheries data for years 2018-2022 in the Bay of Biscay have been collected: logbooks, First Sales Notes, and geospatial systems such as Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) and Automatic Identification System (AIS-B), to estimate the fishing activity for the Basque large- and small-scale fisheries in the Jaizkibel-Capbreton marine area. A workflow is proposed to (1) process different data sources, (2) estimate fishing spatial patterns (in terms of Catch per Unit Effort and Gross Value Added) and the potential Stress Level (SL), defined as the percentage of revenue out of the total that will be lost, vessels will present in case of a spatial closure and (3) identification of main fishing grounds inside this area. Results showed that vessels operating with bottom pair-trawlers targeting pelagic and demersal species and most small-scale fisheries, especially vessels with a home port close to Jaizkibel, should be cautiously treated on future management plans. Moreover, areas around the continental slope and coastal areas are identified as economically important fishing grounds. The workflow presented allows processing and analysis of different data sources, which serves as a decision support tool for managers, allows the analysis of sensitive sector data, reporting the results anonymously, and enables a public discussion.