FISHING EFFORT

The term fishing effort is descriptive of the hard work and drive that have been the foundation of the Icelandic fisheries for centuries. Only the strongest and healthiest of men could be fishermen with all the toil, hardship and danger that they were exposed to. It was the hunting instinct and the hope of a good catch that kept them going.

As the fisheries became technically more advanced the level of fishing effort also increased at a rapid rate and eventually it became necessary to find ways of limiting the fishing effort and thereby limiting the total catch from the most important stocks to the level of their recruitment. It is now clear that in the past few decades the fishing effort was often excessive and as a result the fisheries were not as economic as they might have been and stock utilization was also sometimes beyond scientific recommendations.

Fishing effort is a complex term. Scientists often consider fishing mortality to be a measure of effort and it is therefore considered one of the biological indicators for effort. Economists, on the other hand, consider the use of various inputs that have an economic value and find this to be reasonably well correlated with the fishing mortality. The economic inputs are found to correlate well with the fishery costs but they are complex and it is difficult to find a good, universal input indicator.

The biological and the economic factors have a useful common denominator in the estimate for catch per unit of effort. The catch from a given stock per unit of effort is usually calculated for each type of fishing gear. The unit of effort may be hours of trawling, number of hooks used, number of gillnets placed, number of throws of the Danish seine or a variety of others but in all cases the unit has to be standardised as far as possible to account for technological development and generally increased efficiency.

Effort in the Icelandic fishing grounds
The first picture shows the effort in all the fisheries using various types of trawls. The effort is calculated as the average for the period 1990-1997 and the main targeted species are various groundfish, shrimp, nephrops and Greenland halibut. The dark colours show the areas of the greatest fishing effort to be off the south and west coast and in a large area off Northwest Iceland.

The second picture shows the effort in the groundfish fisheries using longline and is again calculated as the average for the period 1990-1997. The dark colours show the areas of the greatest fishing effort to be off the northwest and west coast but fishing is also concentrated along the entire southwest and south coast. The main targeted species for longline fishing are cod, haddock, catfish and tusk.

The last picture shows the average 1990-97 fishing effort using Danish seine. This is mostly fishing of flatfish but also cod, haddock, saithe and catfish. The main areas of the Danish seine fisheries are just off the south and west coasts but especially in the Reykjanes and Faxabay areas with some smaller areas also off the southeast coast.

The maps are from a book in Icelandic, written by specialists at the Marine Research Institute.

Fishing effort by trawling as trawl hours / square mile

Fishing effort by longlining as '000 hooks / square mile

Fishing effort by Danish seine as number of net placings / square mile.

Fishing effort for cod
The trends for effort in the cod fisheries have been studied for all the major fishing gear, i.e. bottom trawl, gillnets and longline. The effort in 1991-2002 is shown in the following diagram. Clearly,  in the period 1993-97 the effort decreased year by year for all three types of gear, and increased again in the late 1990s, while in 2002 it seemed to decrease for all three types of gear. More recent figures are not available.

Latest update August 2006