Spatial assessment of fishing effort around European marine reserves: Implications for successful fisheries management

9 pages, 3 figures, 4 tables

We examined the spatial dynamic of artisanal fishing fleets around five European marine protected areas (MPAs) to derive general implications for the evaluation of MPAs as fisheries management tools. The coastal MPAs studied were located off France, Malta and Spain and presented a variety of spatial designs and processes of establishment. We developed a standardized methodology to define factors influencing effort allocation and to produce fishing effort maps by merging GIS with geostatistical modelling techniques. Results revealed that in most cases the factors “distance to the no-take”, “water depth”, and “distance to the port” had a significant influence on effort allocation by the fishing fleets. Overall, we found local concentration of fishing effort around the MPA borders. Thus, neglecting the pattern of fishing effort distribution in evaluating MPA benefits, such as spillover of biomass, could hamper sound interpretation of MPAs as fisheries management tools

This manuscript is a product of the fisheries working package (WP2) of the European Commission project “Marine Protected Areas as Tools for Fisheries Management and Conservation” (EMPAFISH; Contract No. 006539). Part of the data collected for this study was also funded by the European project BIOMEX (Contract No. QLRT-2001-00891). The first author was sponsored by a research fellowship of the German Research Foundation (DFG)

Peer reviewed