Abstract
VMSbase is an R package devised to manage, process and visualize information about fishing vessels activity (provided by the vessel monitoring system - VMS) and catches/landings (as reported in the logbooks). VMSbase is primarily conceived to be user-friendly; to this end, a suite of state-of-the-art analyses is accessible via a graphical interface. In addition, the package uses a database platform allowing large datasets to be stored, managed and processed vey efficiently. Methodologies include data cleaning, that is removal of redundant or evidently erroneous records, and data enhancing, that is interpolation and merging with external data sources. In particular, VMSbase is able to estimate sea bottom depth for single VMS pings using an on-line connection to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) database. It also allows VMS pings to be assigned to whatever geographic partitioning has been selected by users. Standard analyses comprise: 1) métier identification (using a modified CLARA clustering approach on Logbook data or Artificial Neural Networks on VMS data); 2) linkage between VMS and Logbook records, with the former organized into fishing trips; 3) discrimination between steaming and fishing points; 4) computation of spatial effort with respect to user-selected grids; 5) calculation of standard fishing effort indicators within Data Collection Framework; 6) a variety of mapping tools, including an interface for Google viewer; 7) estimation of trawled area. Here we report a sample workflow for the accessory sample datasets (available with the package) in order to explore the potentialities of VMSbase. In addition, the results of some performance tests on two large datasets (1×105 and 1×106 VMS signals, respectively) are reported to inform about the time required for the analyses. The results, although merely illustrative, indicate that VMSbase can represent a step forward in extracting and enhancing information from VMS/logbook data for fisheries studies.
Highlights
The exploitation of living resources by fisheries is a complex game played by different actors, each having distinct dynamics and patterns in space and time
This website contains a link to the public repository from which the self-installing R add-on file and some additional resources can be downloaded, and provides supporting contacts, news about the progressive update of the software, and the possibility of being involved in the development project
The usefulness of Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) data as proxy for fishing effort has been repeatedly demonstrated in recent years: they have been used to assess physical effects of fishing gears on sea bottom [30], to relate fishing effort pattern to catches and landings composition [2,31], for marine conservation purposes [32], and to build predictive models for fisheries management [4,33,34]
Summary
The exploitation of living resources by fisheries is a complex game played by different actors, each having distinct dynamics and patterns in space and time. Resources and environment are traditional objects of investigation and modelling, whereas an exhaustive analysis of fishing effort has been hampered by the lack of data about fishing fleet activities in space and time and of proper tools to analyse them. This situation has gradually changed since 2006, with the introduction of the Vessel Monitoring System (VMS), that is a collection system of fishing activity data in space and time. Each fishing vessel is equipped with a blue box that periodically sends signals (pings) containing data about position, speed and course of the vessel. Each signal sent by the blue box is a VMS ping
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