Geographic Information Systems in Fisheries

Chapter 9: Geographic Information Systems in Marine Fisheries Science and Decision Making

Kevin St. Martin

doi: https://doi.org/10.47886/9781888569575.ch9

I shall suggest that in the future, fisheries management and its associated science will have to deal with “places” far more than they have in the recent past. Indeed, I shall suggest that they will have to return, in many cases, to ancient modes of allocating fisheries resources to local communities, rooted in physical places. (Pauly 1997).

The use of geographic information systems (GIS) in decision making and policy development is growing rapidly in many fields of resource management. While these applications are often limited to inventories and basic GIS techniques (e.g., database query), the use of GIS, nevertheless, is making resource management more explicitly spatial. In fisheries, however, the use of GIS has been much more limited, and its impact has yet to be felt to any great degree (Isaak and Hubert 1997; Fisher and Toepfer 1998). This is true particularly for marine fisheries science and management, where GIS is used only occasionally to support or illustrate fisheries assessments or as a supplement to general environmental analysis.1 The use of GIS by managers themselves as an active aid for decision making, scenario testing, site suitability analysis, or socioeconomic analysis has yet to be established in marine fisheries.