Data from: Monitoring temporal and spatial trends of illegal and legal fishing in Canada's marine conservation areas using vessel tracking datasets

Expansion of marine conservation areas (CA) necessitates
resource-efficient and achievable strategies for monitoring and evaluation
of ongoing fishing activity at national levels. To demonstrate and explore
such a strategy, we conducted the first extensive analysis of fishing
activity within Canada’s static, geographically defined marine CAs with
fishing regulations (n = 264 areas). We used eight years of Automatic
Identification System data to estimate fishing effort across three oceans
and conducted temporal and spatial comparisons specific to each CA’s
regulations and enactment date. We addressed questions on CA
effectiveness, fishing displacement, fishing the line behavior, and
relationships between fishing activity and spatial CA attributes. We
estimated 22,000 hours of fishing activity within CAs after enactments,
22% of which was identified as illegal. CA effectiveness appeared to be
lowest for Atlantic CAs based on illegal fishing effort density within
CAs. Fishing displacement and fishing the line was generally not apparent
as buffer areas around CAs tended to already have higher fishing effort
prior to enactments. CA effectiveness and responses to CAs varied
considerably, as was visualized using timeseries plots and maps developed
for each CA. Our evaluation of a nation’s full suite of CAs provides
managers with a foundation and approach for continued monitoring and
reporting.