The Eastern English Channel is an area with strong hydrodynamic features supporting, among other human activities, an important fishery exploitation. Since 1988, IFREMER (French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea) has been carrying out an essential ground fish survey primarily dedicated to ICES annual assessment of major commercial fish stocks in this area. However, these fisheries independent data also offer the opportunity to study of the distribution patterns of observed fish species using geostatistical techniques. Geostatistics embody a suite of methods for analysing spatial data and allow the estimation of the values of a variable of interest at non sampled locations from more or less sparse sample data points. Geostatistical estimation (kriging) is different from other interpolation methods because it uses a model describing the spatial structure and variation in the data – the variogram. The latter is the central tool of geostatistics and is essential for all of the other geostatistical methods. Kriging was used to produce distribution maps of several fish species over 17 years (1988-2004) and variogram parameters reflected changes in distribution patterns over time. Fish aggregation patterns and inter-annual variability were examined in the light of geostatistical analyses of fish distribution and a few example of this study will be presented.