RAM Legacy Stock Assessment Database Geospatial Regions

This data archive describes region definitions for the RAM Legacy Stock Assessment Database.  Within the RAM Legacy database, stock assessments are associated with named areas. We approximate coordinates and bounding boxes for each of these areas, using country EEZs and fishing area shapefiles when appropriate.  In addition, we develop a simple language to encode the GIS shapes of the areas, along with an interpreter to translate these codes into polygons. The syntax supports using political entities, shapefile regions, circles and rectangles, clipped versions of these, and combinations of these.

The archive contains the following contents:

 - syntax.pdf: This document describes the geocoding syntax, and lists all of the geocoding descriptions for the assessment regions.

 - results: This folder contains a shapefile of assessment regions (ram.shp) and a summary file of each region's centroid and size.

 - sources: This folder contains shapefiles for FAO regions and New Zealand fishing regions, used by the syntax system, and latlon.csv which contains the region descriptions for each assessment region.

 - code: load_areas.R contains functions that interpret the geocoding syntax and genshape.R generates the ram.shp shapefile.