Analyses of Trawling Track and Fishing Activity Based on the Data of Vessel Monitoring System(VMS): A Case Study of the Single Otter Trawl Vessels in the Zhoushan Fishing Ground

The original purpose of Vessel Monitoring System（VMS） is for enforcement and control of vessel sailing. With the application of VMS in fishing vessels, more and more population dynamic studies have used VMS data to improve the accuracy of fisheries stock assessment. In this paper, we simulated the trawl trajectory under different time intervals using the cubic Hermite spline（c Hs） interpolation method based on the VMS data of 8 single otter trawl vessels（totally 36000 data items） fishing in Zhoushan fishing ground from September 2012 to December 2012, and selected the appropriate time interval. We then determined vessels’ activities（fishing or non-fishing） by comparing VMS speed data with the corresponding speeds from logbooks. The results showed that the error of simulated trajectory greatly increased with the increase of time intervals of VMS data when they were longer than 30 minutes. Comparing the speeds from VMS with those from the corresponding logbooks, we found that the vessels’ speeds were between 2.5 kn and 5.0 kn in fishing. The c Hs interpolation method is a new choice for improving the accuracy of estimation of sailing trajectory, and the VMS can be used to determine the vessels’ activities with the analysis of their trajectories and speeds. Therefore, when the fishery information is limited, VMS can be one of the important data sources for fisheries stock assessment, and more attention should be paid to its construction and application to fisheries stock assessment and management.