Capturing Illegal Fishing Effort in the Patagonia Shelf

Illegal fishing heavily impacts the health of our oceans, accuracy of fish stock sustainability and profitability of fisheries, and even acts to destabilize geopolitical relations. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 14 “Life Below Water” seeks to conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources. To achieve this goal, it is important to address how illegal fishing affects the biologically sustainable levels of local fish stocks. However, it is difficult to assess the impact of illegal fishing on local fisheries because monitoring and enforcement require significant resources by a country. Recent advances in vessel tracking provide important spatial and temporal data that can be used to assess the impact of illegal fishing using a country’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), an internationally agreed-upon boundary. We exploit these recent advances to develop a model of fishing effort that includes NASA remotely sensed biophysical variables and a novel data set that characterizes the hierarchical patch structure of marine seascapes. We then utilize the EEZ boundary to estimate fishing effort captured by countries illegally operating in the zone using their geospatial location and movement through time derived from tracking data. The primary analysis focuses on predicting fishing effort and the geospatial organization of fishing vessels in the Patagonia Shelf, a region heavily exploited by illegal fishing. Our preliminary results show as much as 10% of fishing effort is captured illegally in the region. We then assess the impact of climate change on legal and illegal fishing effort as biophysical ocean characteristics change. Indeed, climate change will heavily impact local fisheries and steps need to be taken to secure this important resource. Understanding how illegal fishing affects local fisheries and the role of climate change is an important step in addressing sustainable fisheries around the world.