Exercise of recovery available historical data from Spanish and Portuguese fleets to analyze partial fishing footprint in the SEAFO area

Acrobat document, 2 tables and 7 Figures. 13 pagesAt the South-East Atlantic, fisheries resources have been commercially explored by a large international fleet fishing mostly in the Namibian waters. The Spanish and the former Soviet Union have been the predominant distant fleet working at the continental shelf and their activities were managed until 1990 by the International Commission for the South-East Atlantic Fisheries (ICSEAF). Historically, the following countries are known to have been fishing in the current SEAFO Convention Area. Spain, Portugal, Russia, Cyprus, Mauritius, Japan, Korea, Poland, Norway, South Africa and Namibia, but the quality and quantity of data available remain poor (SEAFO, 2008). Thus, the main activities of some of these fleets occur on the continental shelf (EEZ) and sporadically they explored adjacent seamounts, sometime on the route between fishing grounds or as a target activity. This paper intends to stress the importance of bottom fishing footprint as a method to understand the extent of the areas fished up to date in the SEAFO region. For this exercise some available data from the Spanish and Portuguese fleets were used