Artisanal Fishing Behavior in Chile

Fisheries

Chile

Data pipeline

DuckDB

A data pipeline to download, process, and visualize SERNAPESCA satellite positioning data for artisanal fishing fleets in the Los Lagos region.

Published

February 5, 2026

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Overview

This project builds a fully automated pipeline to analyze the spatial behavior of artisanal fishing vessels in southern Chile. Raw data come from SERNAPESCA’s satellite positioning system — an open daily feed of GPS positions for all registered artisanal fleets. The pipeline downloads new reports incrementally, stores them in a DuckDB database, filters the Los Lagos region, and produces a set of fishing behavior indicators and visualizations.

The project is under active development; outputs and indicators may evolve.

Note

Code and documentation available on GitHub.

Data source

SERNAPESCA publishes daily CSV reports with vessel ID, timestamp, latitude, longitude, and speed for every registered artisanal boat in Chile. The download script queries the public web portal incrementally, so only new reports are fetched on each run.

Pipeline structure

Folder	Content
`R/`	Pipeline scripts
`data_raw/`	Downloaded CSVs (not versioned)
`data_processed/`	Filtered and cleaned outputs (not versioned)
`outputs/`	Figures and animations
`assets/`	Supporting images

To reproduce: open R and run source("R/Fisheries_Webbscrapping.R").

Selected outputs

Spatial heatmap — top 30 vessels, Los Lagos (2023)

The heatmap aggregates time spent at each grid cell across the top 30 most active vessels in the region. Darker areas indicate higher cumulative fishing presence.

Heatmap of fishing time for top 30 artisanal vessels in Los Lagos

Quarterly time spent — top 30 vessels

Temporal breakdown showing how fishing effort distributes across quarters for the most active vessels.

Quarterly time spent by top 30 vessels

Vessel track — movement and speed

Individual vessel track for vessel ID 1, colored by recorded speed, illustrating typical movement patterns between fishing grounds and port.

Speed-colored vessel track

Direction of movement

Direction arrows for vessel movement

Vessel animation

Animated trajectory of vessel ID 1 across the Chilean coastline.

Animated vessel movement along the Chilean coast

Technical details

Language	R (100%)
Key packages	`duckdb`, `rvest`, `ggplot2`, `sf`, `gganimate`
License	MIT
Repository	github.com/robcareta/artesanal-fishing-behavior-Chile
Status	Active development