Understanding how fishers redistribute effort in response to changes in stock status, management settings, and operating conditions is increasingly important for fisheries assessment and management. In spatially structured fisheries, changes in fishing behaviour can influence patterns of local exploitation and affect the interpretation of fishery performance indicators, yet fleet-wide responses are rarely quantified using long-term fine-scale datasets.
Using 14 years of geospatial data from Tasmania's commercial abalone fishery, this study examines how fishing effort has been distributed across space and time during a period of declining catches and changing fishery conditions. A suite of spatial analyses is used to characterise effort distribution across multiple scales, from localised concentrations of fishing activity to broader fleet-wide shifts in effort allocation among management regions. Together, these analyses are used to identify spatial and temporal trends in fishing behaviour and to develop metrics that describe the organisation and redistribution of fishing effort.
Preliminary analyses indicate that fishing effort exhibits persistent spatial structure rather than being distributed uniformly across the fishery. Patterns of effort concentration, persistence, and redistribution differ among regions, suggesting that fleet responses are neither uniform nor static. By developing quantitative measures of these patterns, this study provides a framework for describing fleet-wide spatial dynamics and for evaluating how changes in effort distribution may influence the interpretation of fishery trends and abundance indices.