Using VMS to Identify Shifts in Fishing Effort and Catch Composition in Gulf of Mexico Reef Fisheries As a Result of Deepwater Horizon Spill

Commercial fleets play a critical role in driving the population dynamics of exploited stocks, as well as in maintaining coastal economies. This project examines how fishing effort redistributes in response to externally imposed limitations and identifies the resulting impact on individual species targeted as part of a larger complex. Understanding how effort is redistributed spatially and across species will allow managers to identify unforeseen consequences and develop a more proactive response to these events. Specifically, this work evaluates the impacts of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) on the Reef Fish fishery and investigates the impacts on targeted species as well as potential economic consequences for the fleet as a whole. The Deepwater Horizon spill resulted in a sudden spatial area closure in the northern GoM excluding fishing vessels. Linking up vessel monitoring system (VMS) data to the commercial logbook catch records for the three years prior to the spill gives the ability to create baseline spatial distributions of effort and catch-per-unit-of-effort (CPUE) by species. This baseline is compared to distributions for 2010 and the following three years to identify potential short-term and long-term changes to fishing area and species composition.