Abstract
Fisheries in waters beyond national jurisdiction (“high seas”) are difficult to monitor and manage. Their regulation for sustainability requires critical information on how fishing effort is distributed across fishing and landing areas, including possible border effects at the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) limits. We infer the global network linking harbors supporting fishing vessels to fishing areas in high seas from automatic identification system tracking data in 2014, observing a modular structure, with vessels departing from a given harbor fishing mostly in a single province. The top 16% of these harbors support 84% of fishing effort in high seas, with harbors in low- and middle-income countries ranked among the top supporters. Fishing effort concentrates along narrow strips attached to the boundaries of EEZs with productive fisheries, identifying a free-riding behavior that jeopardizes efforts by nations to sustainably manage their fisheries, perpetuating the tragedy of the commons affecting global fishery resources.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | eabe3470 |
| Journal | Science advances |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue number | 9 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 26 2021 |
Bibliographical note
KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2021-03-01Acknowledgements: This research was funded by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) through baseline funding to C.M.D. and the Sensor Initiative grant to C.M.D. and V.M.E. J.F.-G. acknowledges funding from the Vicerrectorado de Investigación e Internacionalización of the University of the Balearic Islands and Campus de Excelencia Internacional CEI15-09 (Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte) in its talent attraction program. V.M.E. received funding from the Ministry of Science and Innovation (Spain) and FEDER through project SPASIMM [FIS2016-80067-P (AEI/FEDER, UE)].
