Amoroso, R. O., et al., Comment on “Tracking the global footprint of fisheries”. Science, 361(6404), 2018. eaat6713.
This paper is a scientific critique of a widely cited study that claimed fishing occurs over more than half of the global ocean. The authors show that this conclusion is largely an artefact of using very coarse spatial resolution, where any fishing activity within a large grid cell causes the entire area to be counted as “fished.” By re-analysing the same Global Fishing Watch data at much higher spatial resolution, they demonstrate that estimated fishing footprints shrink dramatically—by more than a factor of ten globally and more than five for trawl fisheries. The comment also explains that comparisons between fishing and agriculture footprints were misleading, because agriculture was assessed at much finer resolution and accounted only for directly used land. Overall, the paper concludes that low-resolution mapping greatly exaggerates the spatial footprint of fisheries, and that high-resolution analyses are essential for realistic assessments of fishing impacts and for informed marine policy debates.
