Bottom Trawling Effort on Western Africa Seagrass Habitat - Not Protected

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 2022. We calculate the total fishing inside and outside protected seagrass habitats in terms of fishing hours by year and fishing rate ( fishing hours per square kilometers) by country. The table below summarise the fishing effort by GFW dataset