Analysis Of The Trawl Fleet Spatial Distribution During And Post Prestige Oilspill By GIS Simulations And Real Data

No abstracts are to be cited without prior reference to the author.

During and after the Prestige oil spill (13 November 2002), the Spanish Government adopted a series of fisheries management measures in North Atlantic waters of the Iberian Peninsula (ICES Divisions VIIIc and IXa North). The limitations were fishing closure areas, with absolute banning for fishing, and restrictions for fleet types and gears. The Program of observers on board commercial vessels of the Instituto Español de Oceanografía resumed as soon as management measures allowed it. These restrictions could have affected the use of the traditional fishing grounds, specially the spatial fishing effort distribution. The ban could have a similar effect like the produced by the Marine Protected Areas, in terms of transfers to other fishing grounds and changes in the exploitation pattern (Pastoors et al., 2000 and Rijnsdorp et al., 2001), as an indirect result of the management (Dipper and Chua, 1997). The aims of this work are to determine these possible changes on spatial effort distribution derived by the oil spill as well as to explore and test 'simulations module FAST' in this kind of analysis.