AIS derived high resolution fishing effort layer for European trawlers of more than 15 meters long 2014-2015

The high resolution fishing effort layer for European trawlers in the period 2014 -2015 was derived from around 150 million AIS positions reports from EU fishing vessels above 15 m of length, operating in FAO areas 27, 34 and 37, in the period between October 2014 and September 2015. Each AIS message provides the position of the vessel, its speed and a timestamp, at intervals of five minutes. These messages were classified as either related to fishing or to steaming through a classification algorithm based on the analysis of individual vessels’ speed profiles. This classification approach proved to be sufficiently robust in the case of trawlers, that represent the majority of vessels above 15 m of length.

The authors would like to thank MSSIS, courtesy of the Volpe Center of the U.S. Department of Transportation and the U.S. Navy, and MarineTraffic for providing the AIS data used in this study.