Fishing vessels match the ideal free distribution of groundfish across boundaries in the Northwest Atlantic
The problems with using catch data alone to find stock abundance in fisheries have become more well known.
Studying the distribution of fish in their habitat gives more information that can be used to improve our understanding of the drivers of population changes.
Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.
We made several models based on the ideal free distribution concept, where we tested how well the distribution of fishing vessels matched the distribution of fish populations.
Our study focused on the boundary between two fishing zones in the Northwest Atlantic. We found that the amount of fishing in one zone was influenced by the amount of fishing in the other zone.
This result supports our idea that the distribution of fishing vessels matches the distribution of the fish they are catching.
We suggest that fisheries management should consider how population distributions across different fishing zones affect the science they use to make their decisions.
Read the paper — Ideal free distributions form across a regulatory boundary in the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO) Division 4X and 5Z groundfish fisheries by D.T. Enright, P. Comeau, and D.M. Gillis.
