Bottom Trawling Effort in Western Africa Seagrass in MPAs

Understanding the distribution and the pressure of human activities in marine environment is fundamental to ensure its preservation and enhance conservation strategies.Fishery is one of the most important sources of food; yet it is one of the most impactful human activities to marine ecosystems. In particularly, bottom trawling and dredging activities have a disruptive impact to marine species.

Using fishing effort data for bottom trawling and dredging provided by Global Fishing Watch (GFW) (https://globalfishingwatch.org/datasets-and-code/)we conducted an overlay analysis with seagrass boundary data to assess the quantity and distribution of fishing over this habitat inside protected areas and outside protected areas between 2018 and 202. we calculate the total fishing inside and outside protected seagrass habitats in terms of fishing hours by year per square kilometers by country. The table below summarise the fishing effort in Seagrass protected habitat

Analysis performed by Simona Lippi and Andrea Capata

Source Global Fishing Watch (2023)