Fishing Fleet Profiling Methodology (FAO Fisheries Technical Papers)

A fishing fleet profile aims to assist in understanding the complexity and structure of fisheries from the technical and socio-economic points of view, or from the point of view of fishing strategies. A profile consists of analysing the characteristics of individual units of the fleet, for example the boats, in order to classify these units and summarize the heterogeneity of the whole through a description of the component elements and their interrelationships. The identification of the various qualitative and quantitative parameters describing a fishing fleet, together with the characteristics of the boats associated with these parameters, constitutes a profile of the fleet. This document describes the steps necessary to produce such a profile, from planning and the implementation of the fleet survey, through data processing to the presentation of the results. The processes of analysis, classification and description require the application of specific statistical methods in order to extract the items of information that are fundamental and relevant to the objectives of the profile from a data set consisting of the variables describing the units of the fleet. Various methods of data analysis are presented in order to demonstrate their potential uses and relevance to different situations. The aim is to make them intuitively comprehensible without elaborating upon their theoretical basis. The Moroccan inshore fishery and the Senegalese small-scale fisheries have been used as examples in this document.