FisherMob : a bioeconomic model of fishers' migrations

TL;DR

FisherMob is a user-friendly Gama tool that models fishers' migration by integrating economic and biological factors to aid fisheries management and predict mobility patterns.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive bioeconomic model that combines biological variability and economic drivers within a spatially explicit framework for fisheries analysis.

Findings

Simulates fishers' migration patterns based on economic and biological factors.

Provides insights into the impact of market prices and fish abundance on fishing site selection.

Offers a flexible tool for fisheries management and policy planning.

Abstract

Sea fishing is a highly mobile activity, favoured by the vastness of the oceans, the absence of physical boundaries and the abstraction of legislative boundaries. Understanding and anticipating this mobility is a major challenge for fisheries management issues, both at the national and international levels. ''FisherMob'' is a free Gama tool designed to study the effect of economic and biological factors on the dynamics of connected fisheries. It incorporate the most important processes involved in fisheries dynamics: fish abundance variability, price of the fishing effort and ex-vessel fish market price that which depends on the ratio between offer and demand. The tool uses as input a scheme of a coastal area with delimited fishing sites, fish biological parameters and fisheries parameters. It runs with a userfriendly graphic interface and generates output files that can be post-processed easily using graphic and statistical software.