Jose A Fernandes

• Dr.
• Researcher at AZTI

Different fishing strategies have been adopted in the last decades by tropical tuna purse seiners fleet, including fish aggregating device (FAD) and free-swimming school (FSC) fishing strategies, which has raised issues about the different carbon footprint of those fishing modes. Here we show the activity and energy patterns of a Spanish tuna purse...

Fishery monitoring programs are essential for effective management of marine resources, as they provide scientists and managers with the necessary data for both the preparation of scientific advice and fisheries control and surveillance. The monitoring is generally done by human observers, both in port and onboard, with a high cost involved. Conseq...

This study reviews current artificial intelligence (AI) systems legislation, the AI techniques definition proposed by the AI Act and main applications of AI methods in the fisheries sector with special focus on applications to enhance traceability of fishery products, fishing gear selectivity, good practices, and potential to help young people find...

Route optimization methods offer an opportunity to the fisheries industry to enhance their efficiency, sustainability, and safety. However, the use of route optimization Decision Support Systems (DSS), which have been widely used in the shipping industry, is limited in the case of fisheries. In the first part, this work describes the fishing routin...

Ocean warming is projected to threaten fisheries, but the extent varies greatly between models due to a poor understanding of how complex food webs respond to change. Likewise, inequalities in socioeconomic dependence on fisheries and uneven distributions of global fishing effort make it unclear how the distribution of fisheries declines could tran...

Despite global climate-driven change in marine ecosystems and associated economic sectors, climate-smart marine spatial planning (CSMSP) implementation remains limited. This joint perspective from across the climate science and marine spatial planning policy interface discusses reasons for CSMSP's slow pace (blockers) and shares operational example...

Seagrasses have declined worldwide at accelerated rates mainly due to human pressures. Moreover, climate change (e.g. sea level rise) and consequent effects, increase uncertainty about the future evolution of seagrass spatial distribution and biomass. Among other adaptive measures, habitat conservation and restoration can help to adapt and mitigate...

The collection of meteorological and oceanographic (met-ocean) data is essential to advance knowledge of the state of the oceans, leading to better-informed decisions. Despite the technological advances and the increase in data collection in recent years, met-ocean data collection is still not trivial as it requires a high effort and cost. In this...

International biodiversity agreements aim to expand protected areas by up to 30%, including areas beyond national jurisdiction. The high seas' extent, shared governance, and limited biodiversity data challenge the identification of large-scale protected areas. This study uses seascapes defined from satellite data as proxies for biodiversity in the...

Fisheries science aims to understand and manage marine natural resources. It relies onresource-intensive sampling and data analysis. Within this context, the emergence of machinelearning (ML) systems holds significant promise for understanding disparate components ofthese marine ecosystems and gaining a greater understanding of their dynamics. The...

Nowadays, the world’s fishing fleet uses 20% more fuel to catch the same amount of fish compared to 30 years ago. Addressing this negative environmental and economic performance is crucial due to stricter emission regulations, rising fuel costs, and predicted declines in fish biomass and body sizes due to climate change. Investment in more efficien...

The production of wild fish has remained relatively stable in the last two decades, whereas aquaculture organism production has increased to the point where it has exceeded wild catches. In this context, accurate and up-to-date information about the current usage of marine areas for aquaculture is crucial for the planning of marine activities. Howe...

Among the various challenges facing tropical tuna purse seine fleet are the need to reduce fuel consumption and carbon footprint, as well as minimising bycatch of vulnerable species. Tools designed for forecasting optimum tuna fishing grounds can contribute to adapting to changes in fish distribution due to climate change, by identifying the locati...

Balancing blue growth with the conservation of wild species and habitats is a key challenge for global ocean management. This is exacerbated in Global South nations, such as Tanzania, where climate-driven ocean change requires delicate marine spatial planning (MSP) trade-offs to ensure climate resilience of marine resources relied upon by coastal c...

The mesopelagic or ocean twilight zone (OTZ) in the ocean contains huge numbers of fish in a relatively pristine environment and may therefore attract interest as a commercial fishery. In this study we evaluate in economic terms, the likely trade-offs between the different services provided by the mesopelagic layer in the Bay of Biscay and the soci...

Extreme weather events, and long term changes in our coasts and our seas are a present reminder of the breakdown of the global climate system. As efforts to limit the pace of climate change take shape, and climate action unfolds, it is likely that excess greenhouse gas emissions presently in our atmosphere may continue to impact our marine eco...

Ocean warming and acidification, decreases in dissolved oxygen concentrations, and changes in primary production are causing an unprecedented global redistribution of marine life. The identification of underlying ecological processes underpinning marine species turnover, particularly the prevalence of increases of warm-water species or declines of...

Fisheries have a crucial contribution, with animal protein supply and economic income, to the subsistence and blue economy of several human societies of the Atlantic Ocean, the second largest water body in the planet. However, an accurate distribution of commercial fish across the Atlantic and through the water column is still unknown. The wide use...

Fishing vessels need to adapt to and mitigate climate changes, but solutions development requires better information about environment and vessel operations. Even if ships generate large amounts of potentially useful data, there is a large variety in sources and formats. This lack of standardisation makes identification and use of key data challeng...

Decreased body size is often cited as a major response to ocean warming. Available evidence, however, questions the actual emergence of shrinking trends and the prevalence of temperature‐driven changes in size over alternative drivers. In marine fish, changes in food availability or fluctuations in abundance, including those due to size‐selective f...

Our coast and our ocean are undergoing unprecedented changes as a result of the breakdown of our global climate system. These changes represent a significant challenge to the delivery of marine policy that effectively protects ecosystem health, biodiversity and the communities depending on these resources. Creating new, climate-adaptive management...

Fuel Oil Consumption (FOC) accounts for a significant proportion of a vessel's operating costs. The cost of fuel for a fishing vessel operation may often go up to 50% or more. Accurate forecasting FOC in voyage planning stage is essential for route optimization decision support system with the objective of fuel-saving, which is difficult because th...

An assessment framework of marine ecosystem services (ES) indicators to quantify the socio-ecological effectiveness of nature-based solutions (NBS) and nature-inclusive harvesting (NIH) under climate-driven changes was developed. It creates a common understanding about the health status of ecosystems, their services (ES), and the impact of implemen...

Seagrass meadows provide a wide variety of ecosystem goods and services (biodiversity maintenance, carbon sequestration, sediment oxygenation and enrichment, filtering, coastal protection, and nursery area for other species). For this reason, they are areas of high economic development while historically highly impacted by human activity. Therefore...

Fisheries face challenges in improving efficiency and reducing their emission footprint and operating costs. Decision support systems offer an opportunity to tackle such challenges. This study focuses on the dynamic fishing routing problem (DFRP) of a tuna purse seiner from a tactical and operational routing point of view. The tactical routing prob...

Several bird species benefit from anthropogenic food subsidies, such as landfills and fishing discards, that are being reduced owing to introduced legislation. For instance, since 2019, Europe has passed legislation to reduce dramatically the amount of fisheries discards through the Landing Obligation (LO), which states that all fish species under...

Tunas and billfishes are the main large pelagic commercial fish species. Tunas comprised around 5.5 million t and USD 40 billion in 2018. Climate change studies and projections estimate that overall, global fisheries productivity will decrease due to climate change. However, there are seldom projections of the climate-driven productivity of the hig...

The European Commission tendered the study “Marine Biodiversity Modelling” [RTD/2021/MV/10] to pursue the identification and characterization of a subset of candidate biodiversity models that could contribute to the implementation of the European Digital Twin of the Ocean (EU DTO). The EU DTO will be an operational infrastructure for digital ocean...

Accurate and reliable predictions of ship operating fuel expenditures can significantly increase the ship's operation environmental sustainability and profitability. Given there are general aims of shipping economically and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions worldwide, fuel consumption needs to be reduced to mitigate operational costs and GHG...

In this chapter we focus on the future of the coastal economies, in relation to several climate and Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) scenarios addressed in the literature. Once understood their major sources of income, especially in rural Asia, highly dependent on agriculture and fisheries, we examine (in this volume on Blue Economy) first the...

Fishery bycatch is a serious threat to several protected, endangered, and threatened species (PETs), requiring urgent action to develop and implement conservation measures. This study performs an Ecological Risk Assessment for the Effects of Fishing (ERAEF) using a spatially and temporally Productivity–Susceptibility Analysis (PSA) to calculate the...

The WGMLEARN group was formed to explore the use of machine learning in the marine sci-ences, and work towards increasing knowledge of and competence with relevant methods among marine scientists. The specific objectives were to review methods, applications, and im-plementations, to gather knowledge about them from a wide array of scientists, to ad...

Projections of climate change impacts on marine ecosystems have revealed long-term declines in global marine animal biomass and unevenly distributed impacts on fisheries. Here we apply an enhanced suite of global marine ecosystem models from the Fisheries and Marine Ecosystem Model Intercomparison Project (Fish-MIP), forced by new-generation Earth...

Route optimization methods offer an opportunity to the fisheries industry to enhance their efficiency, sustainability, and safety. However, the use of route optimization Decision Support Systems (DSS), which have been widely used in the shipping industry, is limited in the case of fisheries. In the first part, this work describes the fishing routin...

The original version of the book was inadvertently published with wrong affiliation of the editor “Tomas Mildorf” in frontmatter. The affiliation has been changed from “Plan4All Horní Bříza, Czech Republic” to “University of West Bohemia, Univerzitni 8, 301 00 Plzen, Czech Republic”.

Marine spatial planning that addresses ocean climate-driven change (‘climate-smart MSP’) is a global aspiration to support economic growth, food security and ecosystem sustainability. Ocean climate change (‘CC’) modelling may become a key decision-support tool for MSP, but traditional modelling analysis and communication challenges prevent their br...

The National Marine Planning Framework (NMPF) provides a long-term structure for the effective spatial management of marine activities reliant upon Ireland’s marine space and resources. This assessment was co-developed to support the ambition to enable climate-adaptive spatial management through the NMPF, supporting the sustainable use of the Irish...

Climate change is warming the ocean and impacting lower trophic level (LTL) organisms. Marine ecosystem models can provide estimates of how these changes will propagate to larger animals and impact societal services such as fisheries, but at present these estimates vary widely. A better understanding of what drives this inter-model variation will i...

Global ocean warming, wave extreme events, and accelerating sea-level rise are challenges that coastal communities must address to anticipate damages in coming decades. The objective of this study is to undertake a time-series analysis of climate change (CC) indicators within the Bay of Biscay, including the Basque coast. We used an integrated and...

This chapter demonstrates the potential of tuna fishing fleets to reduce their fuel oil consumption. In the “Oceanic tuna fisheries, immediate operational choices” pilot, the data monitoring system on vessels periodically upload data to the server for shore analysis. The data analytics employs fuel oil consumption equations and propulsion engine fa...

The digitalization of the fisheries sector has been limited. However, in this book, the potential for making the sector more competitive and resilient through higher digitalization has been demonstrated using pelagic fisheries as an example. COVID-19 has recently shown the resilience advantages of having a more digitalized industry that makes large...

The use of big data methods and tools are expected to have a profound effect on the pelagic fisheries sustainability and value creation. The potential impact on fuel consumption, planning and fish stock assessments is demonstrated in six different pilot cases. These cases cover the Spanish tropical tuna fisheries in Indian Ocean and the Norwegian s...

Across the European Atlantic Arc (Scotland, Ireland, England, France, Spain, and Portugal) the shellfish aquaculture industry is dominated by the production of mussels, followed by oysters and clams. A range of spatially and temporally variable harmful algal bloom species (HABs) impact the industry through their production of biotoxins that accumul...

Small- and intermediate-size pelagic fisheries are highly impacted by environmental variability and climate change. Their wide geographical distribution and high mobility makes them more likely to shift their distribution under climate change. Here, we explore the potential impact of different climate change scenarios on the four main commercial pe...

New global standards on sulphur content in marine fuels have led to an increasing number of ships installing exhaust gas cleaning systems (EGCS), also known as scrubbers, to reduce their emissions of sulphur oxides to the atmosphere. Ships equipped with a scrubber can continue to use heavy fuel oil, and the process results in discharges of large vo...

Large‐scale and long‐term changes in fish abundance and distribution in response to climate change have been simulated using both statistical and process‐based models. However, national and regional fisheries management requires also shorter term projections on smaller spatial scales, and these need to be validated against fisheries data. A 26‐year...

The study covers two important deltaic systems of the north-east coast of India, viz. the Bengal and Mahanadi delta that support about 1.25 million people. The changes in potential marine fish production and socio-economic conditions were modelled for these two deltas under long-term changes in environmental conditions (sea surface temperature and...

Changes in fish distribution are being observed across the globe. In Europe's Common Fisheries Policy, the share of the catch of each fish stock is split among management areas using a fixed allocation key known as ‘Relative Stability’: in each management area, member states get the same proportion of the total catch each year. That proportion is l...

The Automatic Identification System (AIS) provides detailed tracks of tens of thousands of industrial fishing vessels, and these detailed tracking data have the potential to provide estimates of fishing activity and effort in near real time. Realizing this potential, though, is not straightforward and depends on the vessel size, gear type, and the...

European fleets in the northern half of FAO Area 37 have adopted AIS for almost 100 percent of vessels larger than 15 m, whereas African and Middle East countries have extremely low AIS use in southern and eastern areas where AIS reception is also poor. Most vessels broadcasting AIS in the area use high quality Class A AIS devices, and the AIS rece...

The Arctic, due to its extensive ice cover and remoteness, sees comparatively low amounts of industrial fishing. The only areas with many months of ice-free water are off far western Russia and in the waters near the Hudson Bay; partially as a result, all AIS fishing is concentrated in these regions. According to the Global Fisheries Landing Databa...

The United States of America and Canada, which are responsible for most of the fishing activity in the FAO Area 21, have good use of AIS for vessels larger than 24 m. In addition, AIS reception is very good all over the area for larger vessels broadcasting with high-quality Class A AIS devices. However, reception is quite poor for lower quality Cla...

AIS use in this region is dominated by vessels from the United States of America (trawlers in their majority), largely because most other countries in the region have a very low use of AIS. Class A reception is poor in the Gulf of Mexico, missing much of the fishing activity in that zone, but better in the southern and eastern parts of the region....

Most of the fishing activity detected by AIS included fleets from Morocco and distant water fleets from Europe and Asia. In contrast, little activity by west African nations was seen because few vessels in these fleets carry AIS. Trawling, the most important activity identified by AIS in the region, showed clear concentration patterns along the coa...

AIS use is high by Argentina, Uruguay, the Falkland Islands and foreign fleets fishing in the southern half of the area. Farther north, in the Brazilian EEZ, AIS provides a poor assessment of activity due to low use of AIS. The AIS reception for class A is excellent across the area, while it is poor for class B. There is a high number of distant fl...

Among coastal countries/territories, AIS use is low for Angola and Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, but significant for South Africa and Namibia. For distant water fleets, with several operating in the region, AIS use is high. AIS Class A and B device reception is good except in northern areas for Class B devices. Trawler intensity and...

In the northern portion of the Western Indian Ocean region, the ability to map fishing activity through AIS data is limited by poor AIS reception and low levels of AIS use in artisanal and semi-industrial fleets from coastal countries. Throughout the region, gillnet is one of the main fishing gears for the artisanal and semi-industrial fleets, but...

Class A AIS device reception is good throughout the area, except in northern areas around the Bay of Bengal. However, Class B AIS device reception is good only in the southern half of the Indian Ocean, and very poor in the northern half including the Bay of Bengal. Fishing activity in the eastern Indian Ocean is poorly represented by AIS data, even...

AIS use in FAO Area 61 is dominated by the Chinese fleet. Because of poor AIS reception in the western part of this region and the difficulties accessing regional fleet registries to verify GFW vessel classification, the usefulness of AIS data to identify the fishing level activity by gear type is very limited in this area. AIS identifies fishing a...

This comparison highlights that Automatic Identification System (AIS)-based methods to estimate fishing effort such as the Global Fishing Watch (GFW) methodology can provide the general pattern of relative distribution of fishing effort intensity. These results were obtained in an area where coverage is quite good in general and with good vessels r...

AIS use in the area was relatively low for Mexico and Central America due to the high proportion of domestic near-shore small scale fishing fleets, but high for the United States of America and the distant water fleets. AIS reception was excellent for Class A AIS devices across the entire area. Class B AIS device reception performed poorly in the s...

AIS use is good in the high seas, especially for distant water fleets, but low in the coastal regions. Class A reception is good across the region, while Class B performs well except for vessels operating just outside the South American EEZs. Coastal AIS data, including the highly productive Peruvian fleet fishing anchoveta, is poorly represented i...

Fishing in the Northeast Pacific is dominated by the fleets of the United States of America and Canada, both of which have a high adoption of AIS by larger vessels. AIS Class A reception is excellent, but Class B device reception is medium to poor in most of the area. Trawlers are the most important gear in FAO Area 67, where AIS data highlight wel...

AIS use and reception are extremely poor at the western end of this area, but relatively high and good on the eastern edge. As a result, AIS captures almost none of the important fishing activity in southeast Asia – particularly regarding the domestic fleets. Overall, all gear types are poorly represented except for pelagic longliners and purse sei...

AIS use and reception in this area was relatively high. The exception was reception of Class B devices in the northwestern part of the area. Trawlers and drifting longliners were the most important gears in the area. The trawler industry operating in New Zealand waters appeared well represented in AIS data, but not the demersal activity off Tasmani...

Marine phytoplankton, as primary producers, contribute to the sustenance of bivalve aquaculture. However, some species can synthetize potent toxins, which are ingested by filter-feeding organisms and pose a threat to human health. Aquaculture has traditionally developed in coastal embayments and there, the responses of toxic phytoplankton species t...

While the physical dimensions of climate change are now routinely assessed through multimodel intercomparisons, projected impacts on the global ocean ecosystem generally rely on individual models with a specific set of assumptions. To address these single-model limitations, we present standardized ensemble projections from six global marine ecosyst...

Toxins from harmful algae and certain food pathogens (Escherichia coli and Norovirus) found in shellfish can cause significant health problems to the public and have a negative impact on the economy. For the most part, these outbreaks cannot be prevented but, with the right technology and know-how, they can be predicted. These Early Warning Systems...

The Bay of Biscay is being affected by increasing level of marine litter, which is causing a wide variety of adverse environmental, social, public health, safety and economic impacts. The term “beach littering” has been coined to refer to the marine litter that is deposited on beaches. This litter may come from the sea and through land-based pathwa...

In regression, a predictive model which is able to anticipate the output of a new case is learnt from a set of previous examples. The output or response value of these examples used for model training is known. When learning with aggregated outputs, the examples available for model training are individually unlabeled. Collectively, the aggregated o...

Hilsa (Tenualosa ilisha) or river shad is an anadromous fish species widely distributed in the North Indian Ocean, mainly in the Bay of Bengal (BoB). Hilsa is the national fish of Bangladesh and it contributes 10% of the total fish production of the country, with a market value of $1.74 billion. Hilsa also holds a very important place in the econom...

Climate change is shifting the abundance and distribution of marine species with consequences for ecosystem functioning, seafood supply, management and conservation. Several approaches for future projection exist but these have never been compared systematically to assess their variability. We conducted standardized ensemble projections including 6...

Key messages • Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Maldives are among the countries most affected by climate change and weather events. • There is strong socio-economic pressure from population growth, presence of dams and irrigation needs, heavy metal and waste pollution, habitat modification and destruction, illegal fishing, and insufficient...

Deltas are home to a large and growing proportion of the world’s population, often living in conditions of extreme poverty. Deltaic ecosystems are ecologically significant as they support high biodiversity and a variety of fisheries, however these coastal environments are extremely vulnerable to climate change. The Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (Bangla...

The Bay of Biscay is being affected by increasing levels of marine litter, which are causing a wide variety of adverse environmental, social, public health, safety and economic impacts. The term "beach litter" is used by some authors to refer to the marine litter that is deposited on beaches. This litter can reach the coast due to the wind, the sea...

A flexible meta-model, the Delta Dynamic Integrated Emulator Model (ΔDIEM), is developed to capture the socio-biophysical system of coastal Bangladesh as simply and efficiently as possible. Operating at the local scale, calculations occur efficiently using a variety of methods, including linear statistical emulators, which capture the behaviour of...

Within the Bangladesh delta there is a significant dependence on aquatic ecosystem services both economically and for local well-being. The fisheries industry has seen steady growth with production tripling in the last two decades, largely driven by the expansion in inland aquaculture fisheries. Analysis shows that the impacts of climate change are...