Dear MARMAM colleagues,

We would like to share our recent paper published in Fisheries Research:

Deslias, C., Dubroca, L., Ridoux, V., Bidenbach, E., Peltier, H. 2026. The Hop-o'-My-Thumb white pebbles: How AIS data allow gillnet and trammel net fishing effort to be tracked in the forest of fisheries data. Fisheries Research, 297, 107714. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fishres.2026.107714

Common dolphin bycatch in gillnets and trammel nets remains a major conservation concern, but estimating fishing effort for these static gears has long been a challenge. Conventional methods based on vessel speed or days at sea fail to capture the key parameters that could drive bycatch risk: how much gear is deployed, for how long, and how high the nets are. By combining fine-scale AIS trajectories with onboard observer data, we reconstruct net length, soak time and net height for the French netter fleet in the Bay of Biscay (2016–2023), mapping the resulting hotspots of bycatch risk for common dolphins, mainly on the continental shelf during winter. The approach is reproducible and applicable to other regions.

Best,