Abstract
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has brought a global socio-economic crisis to almost all sectors including the fishery. To limit the infection, governments adopted several containment measures. In Italy, Croatia, and Slovenia, a lockdown period was imposed from March to May 2020, during which many activities, including restaurants had to close or limit their business. All of this caused a strong reduction in seafood requests and consequently, a decrease in fishing activities. The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of the COVID-19 in the Northern and Central Adriatic fleet, by comparing the fishing activities in three periods (before, during, and after the lockdown) of 2019 and 2020. The use of the Automatic Identification System (AIS) data allowed us to highlight the redistribution of the fishing grounds of the trawlers, mainly located near the coasts during the 2020 lockdown period, as well as a reduction of about 50% of fishing effort. This reduction resulted higher for the Chioggia trawlers (−80%) and, in terms of fishing effort decrease, the large bottom otter trawl was the fishing segment mainly affected by the COVID-19 event. Moreover, by analysing the landings of the Chioggia fleet and the Venice lagoon fleets, it was possible to point out a strong reduction both in landings and profits ranging from −30%, for the small-scale fishery operating at sea, to −85%, for the small bottom otter trawl.
Highlights
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) emerged in China in December 2019 (Wang et al, 2020)
In PL the Fishing Effort (FE) resulted quite similar in the two years (−6.6% in 2020; see Figure 3) but in this case, some differences were highlighted in the fishing grounds distribution (Figure 2C)
All this was confirmed by the statistical analysis showing no significant differences in terms of FE, between 2019 and 2020, for the BL and PL periods (t-test, p-value: BL=0.3313 and PL = 0.5249), while a statistically significant difference resulted in the comparison during the LD (t-test, p-value: LD =
Summary
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) emerged in China in December 2019 (Wang et al, 2020). On January 30, 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of COVID-19 a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), and on March 11, 2020 announced the global pandemic. COVID-19 Effects on Adriatic Fishery the infection, the European governments, among the first, adopted several containment measures. In Italy, a lockdown period was imposed from March 11, 2020 until May 17, 2020 (GU, 2020a,b), during which people had to stay at home, leaving the house only for necessary reasons, and many business activities, including restaurants had to close or limit their activities. In almost the same period Croatia (Jakovljevicet al., 2020) and Slovenia (Dentes De Carvalho Gaspar et al, 2020) adopted similar measures
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