Politiken: Analysis of Fishing Activity in Marine Protected Areas

This analysis was aimed to show the public, that what is commonly thought of as “protected” marine areas, was in fact fished intensely with bottom contacting gears i.e. gear types that impact the bottom of the ocean negatively. Using open source data from Global Fishing Watch, I compiled four years of fishing data, from April 1 st 2018 to April 1 st 2022. The data covered a data download frame within a 100 km buffer of the danish exclusive economic zone, making the dataset very large (approx. 4.5 mil. points).

The points were given for the top right corner of the grid cell they covered. I parallel displaced all the points 0.005 degrees in both south and western direction, landing them in the center of the coverage. From there, a grid was created (0.01 x 0.01 deg.), and the points were joined to the grid layer, transferring information to the grid itself.

To avoid overestimation of fishing intensity, fishing activity that does not harm the ocean bottom had to be sorted out. For this I cross referenced the entire dataset with the EU fleet register for each year.

When this was done – the years were aggregated. After that, the analysis of the fishing intensity within the protected areas were carried out and presented in a map. The result was an average of 90.000 hours of bottom harming fishing pr. year within the protected areas.

The analysis was published in Politiken.