Seafood production in Northern Norway: Analyzing variation and co-development in aquaculture and coastal fisheries

Norway is one of the leading ocean-based food production nations. Its seafood industry comprises wild-capture fisheries and farmed fish production. Both industries play a provisional role but also contribute to economic development of the country and help sustain coastal communities, particularly, in Northern Norway. Coastal fishery has been the staple industry in Northern Norway for centuries, while aquaculture complemented the seafood production in this region only approximately 40 years ago. To date, there has been limited knowledge on how the two industries co-developed in Northern Norway. While there are controversies regarding the potential cost and benefit of aquaculture to local communities, only a few studies have addressed co-existence of the two seafood industries in Northern Norway on a municipality scale. In this study, we compared the development of coastal fisheries and aquaculture in Northern Norway over a 14-year period (2005–2018) using a Bayesian approach that allowed to fit a model specific to each municipality, accounting also for temporal changes in both industries. A strong stochastic spatial variation characterized both industries, indicating a sizeable gap in the seafood production between the municipalities. Finally, the study showed that the fisheries and aquaculture likely did not affect each other’s production, suggesting that there were no or few discernible conflicts or synergies between these two industries in Northern Norway. This study featured an advanced method for analyzing variation of seafood production per administrative unit that can be transferable to assess seafood development in other regions of Norway and beyond.