Can observations of fishing vessels from wildlife surveys be used to improve estimates of fishing activity from AIS and VMS?

Describing fishing activity is an important component of assessing the economic impact of offshore energy development on commercial fisheries. The objective of this study was to explore a way to improve estimates of fishing activity off the US Atlantic coast by linking two independent types of data: 1) fishing vessel locations from vessel-mounted GPS tracking systems (i.e., automatic identification system [AIS], and vessel monitoring system [VMS]) and 2) fishing vessel locations observed as ancillary data during wildlife surveys (e.g., North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, Northwest Atlantic Seabird Catalog). The analysis was designed to estimate the proportion of vessel sightings in wildlife surveys that was spatially consistent with synchronous vessel positions interpolated from GPS tracking system data.