A publicly accessible fisheries database that builds on the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) statistics has been created, covering the fisheries of all maritime countries and territories of the world, from 1950 to 2010, and being regularly updated.
The announcement was made by The Sea Around Us Project, which welcomed the news stressing that this database overcomes the deficiencies present in the one maintained that FAO, which covers only landings but does not identify the EEZs where the landings come from, doesn’t present the data by sectors, and doesn’t estimate the illegal and otherwise unreported and undocumented (IUU) catches usually generated by roving distant-water fleets.
This new database is based on historic catch reconstructions by about 400 colleagues throughout the world, a decade-long support of the Sea Around Us by The Pew Charitable Trusts, and the technical wizardry of programmers at Seattle-based Vulcan Inc., which complemented a two-year grant from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.
This new tool also presents catch-related data and indicators that allow managers, scientists, students or ocean activist to find out how much is caught of the EEZ of each country and territory, by species or group of species, by sectors, by catch type, and thus to acquire an understanding of the fisheries that was impossible to obtain previously, and which should help toward an improvement of their management. The data underlying the interactive graphic displays can be downloaded for further analysis.
All information on marine biodiversity in that database is derived from FishBase for fishes and from SeaLifeBase for invertebrates. These recognized online encyclopedias are closely linked to The Sea Around Us, and so allow for acquiring more information on exploited species.
Additionally, the database has a spatial expression and of the fisheries that rely on them. The result is that catch maps can be produced, by group of species and/or countries, showing, for example, how fisheries have expanded geographically from 1950 to the present.
As mentioned above, this database does not provide all the key information required to manage fisheries; notably, it lacks time series of biomass, a fact that the entity aims to overcome in the next few years. However, it is expected that the interactive graphs and maps that can be viewed on, and datasets will contribute to a better understanding of marine fisheries.
For example, using this database, the organisation could recently demonstrate that the world marine fisheries catches are about 50 per cent higher than suggested by the FAO statistics (which can be viewed as a good thing, since it implies the oceans are more productive than we thought), but have been declining rapidly since 1996, which is definitely an issue that needs to be addressed.
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