The environmental niche of the global high seas pelagic longline fleet.

摘要: International interest in the protection and sustainable use of high seas biodiversity has grown recent years. There is an opportunity for new technologies to enable improvements management these areas beyond national jurisdiction. We explore spatial ecology drivers global distribution longline fishing fleet by creating predictive models effort from newly available automatic identification system (AIS) data. Our results show how can be predicted using environmental variables, many related expected species targeted longliners. also find that seasonal preferences (for example, increased importance cooler surface waters during boreal summer) may only 38 64% environmentally suitable habitat. Possible explanations include misclassification effort, incomplete AIS coverage, or potential range contractions pelagic have reduced abundance habitats open ocean.