A novel and simple approach to define artisanal fisheries in Europe

Although the importance of the social, economic, environmental and traditional importance of artisanal fisheries is widely accepted, there is no single internationally accepted definition for this activity, since its characteristics differ among countries. Notwithstanding, it is also generally accepted that artisanal fisheries comprises a group of characteristics that clearly differ from those of the industrial fishing. In the present paper, an objective, simple and easy to use methodology is presented for the segmentation of fishing fleets by using a group of descriptors currently available in the European Union datasets. The numerical descriptors approach (NDA) is a score-based methodology that was applied to several EU fishing fleets from the Atlantic Area. The results obtained allow a more realistic segmentation of the European fishing fleet into artisanal (both coastal artisanal and small-scale fisheries) and non-artisanal than the current limit of 12 m vessels overall length. The procedure can be, and should be, refined and improved by the addition of new descriptors (e.g. operational range of the vessels and fishing effort, time spent at sea as well as other socio-economic indicators) when the necessary information becomes available for the entire European fishing fleet. The NDA represents a flexible tool that could be used at any geographical scale by adapting the final score and/or the numerical ranges of each descriptor.