ABSTRACT
The oceans, which cover 71 per cent of the Earth’s surface, sustain one of the most precious food resources on our planet. Fish is an important source of food for the sustainability of an increasing human population currently providing the major source of protein for one billion people worldwide. The facts that marine resources are reproducing themselves to provide future generations with food and that the access and harvest of these resources became an easy task resulting to overexploitation makes it important to manage fisheries better. Today, most problems in fisheries are in the spatial domain, since specific areas are heavily fished, habitats are damaged and small size fish are caught. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a monitoring and management tool as well as an intermediate process in integrated decision aid tools are exactly designed to solve spatiotemporal problems and are already being used in fisheries applications since the last decade.
