Highly mixed fisheries: fine-scale spatial patterns in retained catches of French fisheries in the Celtic Sea

Abstract

Efficiency of mixed-fisheries management and operational implementation of the ecosystem approach to fisheries management rely on the ability to understand and describe the technical and biological interactions between fleets, gears and species. The present study aims to describe fine-scale spatial patterns of the French demersal mixed fisheries in the Celtic Sea and discusses their implications in terms of management. Analysis was made by integrating vessel monitoring systems and logbook data collected between 2010 and 2012 at a 3′*3′ spatial scale through the use of principal component analysis followed by hierarchical clustering. It revealed spatial regions defined by a distinct homogeneous composition of retained catches. Each cluster was also described in terms of the fishing activity: vessel length, effort, power and gear used. The analysis revealed a complex spatial structure in the species assemblage caught and suggests that a single situation cannot describe the mixed fisheries of the Celtic Sea, but rather that there are several distinct cases of mixed fisheries. Our results also highlight the limitations of using the current level of data aggregation commonly requested in international data calls to model these fisheries and suggest that improvements should be made to ensure efficient evaluation of management options. Analyses of spatially resolved fisheries data such as the one presented here open a range of potential applications. In the context of the Common Fisheries Policy reform and the landing obligation, comparison of our results with applications of the same methodology to a subset of vulnerable species or to catches of fish below the minimum conservation reference size would help to identify the geographical areas to avoid and assess potential effort reallocation strategies based on groups of target species.