Far from home: Distance patterns of global fishing fleets

Abstract

Postwar growth of industrial fisheries catch to its peak in 1996 was driven by increasing fleet capacity and geographical expansion. An investigation of the latter, using spatially allocated reconstructed catch data to quantify "mean distance to fishing grounds," found global trends to be dominated by the expansion histories of a small number of distant-water fishing countries. While most countries fished largely in local waters, Taiwan, South Korea, Spain, and China rapidly increased their mean distance to fishing grounds by 2000 to 4000 km between 1950 and 2014. Others, including Japan and the former USSR, expanded in the postwar decades but then retrenched from the mid-1970s, as access to other countries' waters became increasingly restricted with the advent of exclusive economic zones formalized in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Since 1950, heavily subsidized fleets have increased the total fished area from 60% to more than 90% of the world's oceans, doubling the average distance traveled from home ports but catching only one-third of the historical amount per kilometer traveled. Catch per unit area has declined by 22% since the mid-1990s, as fleets approach the limits of geographical expansion. Allowing these trends to continue threatens the bioeconomic sustainability of fisheries globally.

Fig. 1. Trends in the distance traveled to fish from 1950 to 2014.

Mean distance to fishing grounds for the world’s 20 largest industrial fishing countries (by tonnage) grouped by expansion history: (A) rapid and continuous expansion, (B) expansion followed by retrenchment, and (C) limited expansion. Percentage of global catch over the past decade is shown at the top of each panel. Countries not labeled in (C) are Argentina, Chile, Iceland, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Philippines, and United States.

Fig. 2. Trend in mean global industrial catch per 1000 km traveled from 1950 to 2014.

Gray band indicates ±95% confidence interval of LOWESS smoothed time series.

Fig. 3. Trends in total catch and area fished by global industrial fisheries, 1950–2014.

(A) Global industrial fisheries catch (8), (B) percentage of ice-free ocean area exploited, and (C) industrial catch per unit ocean area. Dashed line indicates year of peak global catch in 1996, with percentage growth/decline since 1996 labeled on each time series.

Fig. 4. Spatial mapping of the distribution and intensity of industrial fishing catch.

Mean industrial fisheries catch in metric tons per square kilometer by catch location during the (A) 1950s and (B) 2000s.