"Too Big To Ignore": A feasibility analysis of detecting fishing events in Gabonese small-scale fisheries.

ABSTRACT: In many developing countries, small-scale fisheries provide employment and important food security for local populations. To support resource management, the description of the spatiotemporal extent of fisheries is necessary, but often poorly understood due to the diffuse nature of effort, operated from numerous small wooden vessels. Here, in Gabon, Central Africa, we applied Hidden Markov Models to detect fishing patterns in seven different fisheries (with different gears) from GPS data. Models were compared to information collected by on-board observers (7 trips) and, at a larger scale, to a visual interpretation method (99 trips). Models utilizing different sampling resolutions of GPS acquisition were also tested. Model prediction accuracy was high with GPS data sampling rates up to thr

SUBMITTER: Cardiec F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7286497 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature