Gulf Collage Crab Fleet by Dennis Jarvis - CC 2.0), Snow Crab by NOAA Public Domain

The Snow Crab (Chionoecetes opilio) fishery in the Gulf of St. Lawrance has provided a unique opportunity study vessel dynamics through our collaboration with colleagues at the Gulf Fisheries Centre in Moncton, New Brunswick. This fishery developed rapidly through the 1980s and entered a period of co-management in the late 1990s. In the early 2000s it was one of the earliest fisheries to collect in-season positioning data combining GPS positioning and satellite reporting for both management and safety. Combined with catch records from vessel logs this has allowed us to examine information exchange and competition among vessels (Gillis et al. 2006) as well as applying advanced statistical models to infer vessel behaviour from positioning data (Charles et al. 2014). This modeling and analysis assists in the interpretation of basic commercial fishery data to improve the population estimates used for conservation and management.