Introduction

The Davao Gulf in the Philippines hosts incredibly diverse and productive marine ecosystems. Depending upon these systems, are a wide variety of species, ranging from grayface morays to whale sharks.

These species aren't the only ones depending on the gulf however. By fishing on it, thousands of people depend on the gulf for sustenance and/or economic welfare. As the Davao Region's population grows, so does the number of fish landings made from the gulf. With this, we eventually risk overexploiting the gulf, potentially leading to irreversible harm being done to this beautiful part of nature. This would be disastrous,
both to the beautiful species living in the gulf and to ourselves.

In order to limit harm done to the gulf, various management efforts have been implemented. More recently, a closed fishing season was enacted, preventing commercial vessels from fishing in the gulf during the months of June, July and August. Such management efforts can risk adverse effects if they're not effectively implemented however, or if their results aren't reliably monitored.

With the primary aim of monitoring the effects of the closed fishing season, Macusi Edison, an associate Professor at the Davao Oriental State University (DOrSU) and an associate member of the National Research Council of the Philippines (NRCP), uses GPS devices and interviews to map and analyze the distribution of artisanal fishing efforts across the gulf in both the open and closed fishing seasons.
During my Professional Practice, I got to contribute to this research project by Professor Macusi, who took up the position of my mentor.

Sadly however, data during the closed fishing season hadn't yet been obtained during the time of my Practice.
As a result, we haven't yet been able to provide answers on the closed fishing season's effects. Instead, our work focused on analyzing and interpreting the spatial distribution of fishing efforts in March, April and May. Software programs used for these analyses most notably included QGIS and R.

With these analyses, we aimed: (i) to map the distribution of artisanal fishing efforts, (ii) to map the overlap between fishing areas, (iii) to analyze the relationship between the distance travelled by vessels and the distinct fisher tracked, the municipalities of origin and the month and lastly (iv) to analyze differences in the speeds at which vessels travelled between municipalities.

Our expectations were that: (i) fishing effort distributions seen are typical for the fishing gears and vessels most often used in a municipality, (ii) specific areas in the gulf show a high degree of overlap between fishing areas due to them being close to shore and/or containing the most fish, (iii) the distances travelled differ significantly between distinct fishers and municipalities, but not between months and (iv) that the speeds at which vessels travelled significantly differ between municipalities.