Global Fisheries Science Documents Human Impacts on Oceans: The Sea Around Us Serves Civil Society in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Fishing provides the world with an important component of its food supply, but it also negatively impacts the biodiversity of marine and freshwater ecosystems, especially when industrial fishing is involved. To mitigate these impacts, civil society needs access to fisheries data (i.e., catches and catch-derived indicators of these impacts). Such data, however, must be more comprehensive than the official fisheries statistics supplied to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) by its member countries, which shape public policy in spite of their deficiencies, notably underestimating small-scale fisheries. This article documents the creation, based on the geographically coarse FAO data, of a database and website ( https://www.seaaroundus.org ) that provides free reconstructed (i.e., corrected) catch data by ecosystem, country, species, gear type, commercial value, etc., to any interested person, along with catch-derived indicators from 1950 to the near present for the entire world. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Marine Science, Volume 15 is January 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

3D ocean assessments reveal that fisheries reach deep but marine protection remains shallow

“…Systematically distinguishing between pelagic and benthic fishing and increasing the precision of the spatial information associated with catch data would constitute important steps forward to improve our understanding of the depths targeted by fisheries. Our results underestimate fishing pressure overlying euphotic to rariphotic depths because the GFW database only documents vessels with automatic identification systems, which does not capture most small-scale fisheries, especially in the Caribbean, South-West Pacific, and Indian Ocean where catches are systematically underreported 23 , 25 .…”

“…However, a three-dimensional framework to identify conservation gaps and priority areas across depths is still missing. In particular, while fisheries are the main driver of marine biodiversity erosion 22 , global assessments of fisheries’ footprint remain two-dimensional 14 , 23 – 25 and fail to inform on which depths are being targeted 26 – 28 . This represents a critical knowledge gap to inform fisheries management and marine conservation because the sensitivity of ecosystems to fishing pressure varies greatly with depth 29 .…”

Trends in Indian Ocean marine fisheries since 1950: synthesis of reconstructed catch and effort data

“…The present study synthesises the detailed domestic catch reconstructions undertaken for the EEZs of every Indian Ocean rim country (Supplementary Table S1) plus the foreign fishing data (distant-water fleets) as allocated to Indian Ocean EEZs and high-seas areas (Zeller et al 2016(Zeller et al , 2023. This contribution comprises both domestic waters, defined as the waters within the EEZs of individual countries (Fig.…”

“…Dark blue denotes the exclusive economic zones (EEZ) of Indian Ocean rim countries that are within the Indian Ocean basin. EEZ and FAO area boundaries taken from the Sea Around Us (Zeller et al 2023). Scale 1:73 000 000. economic cash revenues generated by permitting foreign fishing interests direct, reflagged or joint-venture access to the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of countries represents a very strong incentive for national fisheries policy (Sheppard 2018;Belhabib et al 2019).…”

“…Here, we present a synthesis of marine fisheries data and analyses for the Indian Ocean basin from 1950 to 2018, building on fisheries research and data activities by the Sea Around Us and Sea Around Us -Indian Ocean (Pauly 2007;Zeller et al 2023), with emphasis on the reconstructed catch and fishing-effort history, as well as resulting catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) indices. We recognise that reconstructed data may contain errors and may have higher uncertainties than do reported data (Pauly and Zeller 2017;Zeller and Pauly 2019), and we welcome collaborations and opportunities for engagements to correct any potential errors to improve the underlying data.…”