The coastal mosaic, quantified: unsupervised spatial clustering of Chile’s artisanal and industrial fisheries landings

Abstract

Chile’s artisanal and industrial fisheries operate under differentiated institutional, spatial, and operational arrangements, yet the regional structure of their multispecies landing compositions has not been quantified using a common exploratory framework. This study analyses official Chilean landings by species, subsector, and administrative region for 2022–2024. For each region, a multispecies landing signature was constructed from proportional landings. k -Means clustering was then applied separately to artisanal, industrial, and total landings, with the number of clusters evaluated using inertia and average silhouette diagnostics. The analysis identified two broad industrial landing-composition types, seven artisanal landing-composition types, and two types in the aggregate dataset. These results should not be interpreted as evidence that the two subsectors are independently organised in space, since part of their differentiation is already embedded in Chile’s regulatory and administrative framework. Rather, the clusters describe how regional landing compositions are structured within subsectors that are already institutionally differentiated. The industrial subset is summarised by a limited number of regional landing profiles, whereas the artisanal subset requires a more differentiated partition to represent variation in relative species composition. The study provides an exploratory and reproducible framework for summarising multispecies regional landings. The resulting typologies are best understood as regional landing-composition types, not as biological stocks, causal governance effects, or formal management units. They can support comparative description, identify regions with similar relative species mixes, and generate hypotheses for future analyses incorporating biological, environmental, fleet, market, or institutional variables.