A Spatial Decision Support System for the sustainable management of fishing in marine protected areas

Recreational and professional fishing are spread all over the world, generating revenues and opportunities but impacting on limited fish stocks. even if stocks can recover, over-exploitation and permanent damages to ecosystems must be avoided. The aim of this work is to provide a Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) to develop sustainable management strategies for fishing in marine protected areas (MPAs). The system, based on a generalized and iterable procedure and tested on the Portofino MPA (Italy), can be applied to any area. Starting from the assessment of the natural capital, the SDSS allows an ecosystem-based evaluation of fishing impact based on information (namely the harvest per species) gathered during the autho- rization procedure, mandatory for fishermen in MPA. The system assists MPA managers to understand if the MPA is able to support fishing or if there is an over-fishing status, by subtract- ing the fishing annual catches flow from the fish biomass production flow for each species. Being fishing spatially distributed, the SDSS generates results (e.g., values, maps) at different spatial level: MPA, protection zones and even smaller. The implementation of fishing manage- ment procedures through the SDSS allows the quick update of results and the simulation of alternative management scenarios.