The WG-SAM in 2016 “agreed the importance of identifying a set of diagnostics and clear criteria to assess the likelihood that a vessel is operating as would be expected in normal research activities”, further noting that a characterisation of fishing activities was also required in order to achieve such a goal (WG-SAM 2016, paragraph 4.19).
In this paper, we further develop the analysis of Large et al. (2016), using fishing activities in the northern Ross Sea region as an example. We investigate the time taken to haul a line as a metric, and estimate vessel effects associated with fishing events such as research surveys. Results showed that individual vessels exhibited significantly different times to haul lines once standardised for other factors, but that the activities carried out as part of the SSRU 88.2A–B North survey were within the expected range for the vessels involved. Additional fishing activity metrics, combinations of those metrics, or area effects could be investigated by developing this methodology further.