Proper designation of Essential Fish Habitat (EFH) is a highly important spatial measure in any management of fishery resources. EFH is defined as those waters and substrates necessary to fish for spawning, breeding, feeding, or growth to maturity, a definition that includes the physical, chemical and biological properties of marine areas and the associated sediment and biological assemblages that sustain fish populations throughout their full life cycle. This book presents latest advances in EFH mapping and modelling and introduces the environmental approach to EFH identification through the combined use of latest technologies and advanced techniques, such as Remote Sensing, Geographic Information Systems and Spatial Statistics. The contents of this book include overviews and comparisons of different approaches on species habitat modelling, methods to identify teleconnection patterns between large-scale meteo-oceanic phenomena and local environmental variation, and EFH maps for cephalopod, shrimp, hake, anchovy, sardine, and swordfish resources in the Mediterranean. The aims of this book are to provide accumulated knowledge on marine species essential habitat mapping and to be a source for further developments in the important topic of marine resource management.

Over the last two decades there has been increasing recognition that problems in oceanography and fisheries sciences and related marine areas are nearly all manifest in the spatio-temporal domain. Geographical Information Systems (GIS), the natural framework for spatial data handling, are being recognized as powerful tools with useful applications in marine sciences. Geographic Information Systems in Oceanography and Fisheries provides a thorough examination of marine GIS applications that include a wide variety of methods and sophisticated approaches in coastal, continental shelf, and deep ocean studies. It presents new innovative approaches of using GIS in the examination of the dynamic relations that characterize the marine world, including marine GIS macro routines for the development of oceanography and fisheries GIS tools and applications.This book is divided into four parts. The first gives an overview of marine GIS, including conceptual issues on marine spatial thinking and models of marine GIS development. The second and third parts examine the main sampling methods and online sources of spatially referenced data, and discuss application examples and innovative approaches in GIS developments for many oceanographic and fisheries tasks. The fourth part presents GIS technical issues by listing marine GIS routines for a wide array of GIS tasks.Anyone with interests in marine GIS development, physical and biological oceanography, fisheries and information based proposals for ocean and fisheries resource management will find this book useful.