FisherMob : a bioeconomic model of fishers' migrations

Abstract: Sea fishing is a highly mobile activity, favoured by the vastness of the oceans, the absence of physical boundaries and the abstraction of legislative boundaries. Understanding and anticipating this mobility is a major challenge for fisheries management issues, both at the national and international levels. ''FisherMob'' is a free Gama tool designed to study the effect of economic and biological factors on the dynamics of connected fisheries. It incorporate the most important processes involved in fisheries dynamics: fish abundance variability, price of the fishing effort and ex-vessel fish market price that which depends on the ratio between offer and demand. The tool uses as input a scheme of a coastal area with delimited fishing sites, fish biological parameters and fisheries parameters. It runs with a userfriendly graphic interface and generates output files that can be post-processed easily using graphic and statistical software.