The Western and Central Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) have compiled a public domain version of aggregated catch and effort data using operational, aggregate and annual catch estimates data provided by Commission Members (CCMs) and Cooperating Non-members (CNMs). The data provided herein have been prepared for dissemination in accordance with the current “Rules and Procedures for the Protection, Access to, and Dissemination of Data Compiled by the Commission” or (“RAP”).
Paragraph 9 of the Rules and Procedures indicates that "Catch and Effort data in the public domain shall be made up of observations from a minimum of three vessels". However, the majority of aggregate data provided to WPCFC do not indicate how many vessels were active in each cell of data which would allow data to be directly filtered according to this rule. Instead, the individual cells where "effort" is less than or equal to the maximum value estimated to represent the activities of two vessels have been removed from the public domain data (the cells are retained with their time/area information, but all catch and effort information in these have been set to zero). Statistics showing how much data have been removed according to this RAP requirement are provided in the documentation for the longline and purse seine public domain data.
All public domain data have been aggregated by year/month and 5°x5° grid. Annex 2 of the RAP indicates that public domain aggregated catch/effort data can be made available at a higher resolution (e.g. data with a breakdown by vessel nation, and aggregated by 1°x1° grids for surface fisheries); however, if the public domain data were provided at these higher levels of resolution implementation of the RAP "three-vessel rule" with the current aggregate data set would result in too many cells being removed.
However, please note that the data that have been removed from the public domain dataset, available on this webpage, are still potentially accessible via other provisions of the RAP (refer to section 4.6 and para 34).
Each public domain zip file contains two files: (1) a CSV file containing the data; (2) a PDF file containing the field names/formats and the coverage with respect to the data file.
These data files were last updated on the 27th July 2020.
