Identifying the best fishing-suitable areas under the new European discard ban

Abstract The spatial management of fisheries has been repeatedly proposed as a discard mitigation measure. A number of studies have assessed the fishing suitability of an area based on units of by-catch or discard per unit effort. However, correct identification of fishing-suitable areas should assess biomass loss with respect to the benefits. This study therefore, proposes the analysis of by-catch ratios, which do represent benefit vs. loss and are standardized to a wide range of effort characteristics. Furthermore, our study proposes the use of two ratios: the proportion of total unwanted biomass out of the total catch as an indicator of the overall ecological impact, and the proportion o…