Scallop fishing activity characterization in Southern New England: Offshore wind demands and fisheries-dependent methods

Managers attempt to minimize spatial use conflicts in siting of offshore wind developments, but they must rely on available data to balance biological, commercial, and recreational needs. Marine spatial planning products are only as good as the data they are built upon and fishing data present major challenges due to their confidentiality and the difficulty in isolating true fishing activity. We present a methodology to increase the spatiotemporal resolution of fishing effort and exposure estimates for Southern New England scallop fishing activity using random decision forests to perform supervised classification on AIS data, with fallback to lower resolution datasets for vessels without AIS coverage. Final predictive accuracy of the tuned random forest AIS model was 97.9%, offering improvements of 24.7, 48.6, and 50% over VTR fishing footprints, and AIS and VMS speed cutoff methods, respectively, to predict whether vessel locations correspond to fishing activity. Comparison of the AIS model with VMS and VTR fallback to the VTR fishing footprints data product demonstrated that the increased precision of the AIS point data delineated as fishing dramatically changed how fishing effort, and therefore exposure in the form of fishery landings values, is distributed spatially in Southern New England wind energy areas. This is due to how the probability of fishing is distributed across location data points in the various products, which has implications for marine spatial planning and mitigation decision-making. Therefore, multiple data products should be considered when evaluating management options, as exposure estimates may differ depending on what inputs are used. The higher resolution AIS product may offer enhanced value in understanding exposure and impacts to individual vessels, especially once wind farms are under construction or operational.