FISHING BOAT DISTRIBUTION ESTABLISHED BY COMPARING VMS AND VIIRS DATA AROUND THE ARU ISLANDS IN MALUKU INDONESIA

Abstract

Marine protected areas (MPAs) and no take zones (NTZs) are essential for the preservation of marine ecosystems. However, these important areas can be severely harmed by illegal fishing. All vessels above 30 gross tons are required to use vessel monitoring systems (VMSs) that enable vessel tracking by sending geographic data to satellites in each specific time period. The Visible Infrared Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) is a sensor on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)-20 satellite that can detect the light-emitting diode (LED) light used by fishing vessels from space during the night time. In this research, VMS and VIIRS fishery data were combined in order to identify fishing vessels that were detected by the VIIRS sensor of the NOAA-20 satellite. The research was focused on an area near the Aru Islands in the Arafura Sea in Indonesia. Data on LED light used by the fishing techniques of purse seine and bouke ami were obtained for the whole of 2018. The data were then processed using R software. An R package called LLFI (LED Light Fisheries Identifier) was created, containing several R-functions that calculate VMS vessel position during satellite overpass time and then combine the VMS and VIIRS data attributes, resulting in a dataset comprising vessels identified from the VIIRS dataset. Out of all the estimated VMS fishing vessel positions during the VIIRS satellite overpass, approximately 51% could be assigned to fishing vessels detected from the VIIRS dataset. For bouke ami, the identification rate was approximately 87%, while that for small purse seine was around 39%. Ultimately, the LLFI package created daily paths for each identified fishing vessel, displaying all its movements during the day of its’identification. These daily paths did not show any activity within MPA or NTZ. The LLFI package was successful in combining VMS and VIIRS data, estimating VMS vessel positions during the VIIRS satellite overpass, identifying a percentage of  the vessels, and creating a daily path for each identified vessel.