Defend as You Can, React Quickly: The Effects of the COVID-19 Shock on a Large Fishery of the Mediterranean Sea

This paper presents an analysis of the effect of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus pandemic and related restrictive measures on the activity of the Italian fleet of trawlers, which represents one of the most important fisheries in the Mediterranean Sea. We integrated multiple sources of information including: (1) Fleet activity data from Vessel Monitoring System, the most important satellite-based tracking device; (2) vessel-specific landing data disaggregated by species; (3) market and economic drivers affecting the effort variation during the lockdown and in the related fishing strategies; (4) monthly landings of demersal species in the main Italian harbors. These data sources are combined to: (1) Assess the absolute and relative changes of trawling effort in the geographical sub-areas surrounding the Italian coasts; (2) integrate and compare these changes with the market and economic drivers in order to explain the observed changes in fishing effort and strategy; (3) analyze the changes of the fishing effort on the Landing-per-unit-effort (LPUE) in order to further understand the strategy adopted by fishers during this crisis and to infer the potential consequence for the different stocks. The results provide an overview of the effects of the "COVID-19 shock," in terms of fishing activity and socio-economic drivers, demonstrating that the consequences of the pandemic have been very varied. Although the COVID-19 shock has caused a marked overall reduction in activity in the first semester of 2020, in some cases the strategies adopted by fishermen and the commercial network linked to their activity have significantly reduced the impact of the emergency and taken back catch and effort to levels similar to those of previous years. These results could provide insights for management measures based on temporal stops of fishing activities. In particular, if no limits to the fishing effort after the restart of fishing activities are adopted, the benefits of fishing pressure reduction on fishery resources could be nullified. On the other hands, when fishing activities restart, and in the absence of catch control, effort tends to increase on coastal bottoms characterized by greater abundance of resources and longer effective fishing time.