Geographic Information Systems in Fisheries

Chapter 8: Geographic Information Systems Applications in Offshore Marine Fisheries

Anthony J. Booth and Brent Wood

doi: https://doi.org/10.47886/9781888569575.ch8

Marine ecosystems are under direct threat from growing anthropological influences such as habitat degradation, overfishing, and global warming. This places pressure on both scientists and managers to make informed decisions that help mitigate a growing suite of problems. Scientists, therefore, are required to make inferences based on knowledge about the marine system being studied (from samples collected or the literature consulted) in order to provide qualified recommendations. Scientific recommendations usually are transferred to the managers who, assuming a lack of political intervention, then draft the necessary policies to be implemented. In many cases, critical information is not available or there is a lack of fundamental knowledge of the dynamics of the system. In these situations, the “precautionary principle” (FAO 1995) would be invoked, that is, when data or information pertaining to the status of a resource are limited, then the most conservative harvesting strategy should be implemented.

Geographers and fisheries scientists have, over the past two decades, fostered a shared interest in the spatial analysis of physical and biological resources. Geographers are skilled in understanding the concept of space and relationships among geographic entities. Fisheries scientists, on the other hand, are skilled in the separation of stocks, life histories, biological interaction, resource abundance, recruitment dynamics, and stock assessment. Synergy between the two disciplines has resulted in the adoption of geographic information systems (GIS) to collect, store and retrieve, and analyze fisheries related data that are spatially referenced (Caddy and Garcia 1986; Giles and Nielsen 1992; Isaak and Hubert 1997; Meaden 1999; Nishida and Booth 2001).