The CALFISH database: A century of California's non-confidential fisheries landings and participation data

California's commercial and recreational fisheries support vibrant coastal economies and communities. Maintaining healthy fishing communities into the future requires a detailed understanding of their past. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has been monitoring statewide fisheries landings and participation since 1916 and releases confidential versions of this data through authorized data requests and non-confidential summaries of this data in its quasi-annual landings reports. The non-confidential data published in the landings reports provide a rich history of California's fisheries but are scattered across 1000s of tables in 100 s of documents, limiting their accessibility to researchers, fishers, and other interested stakeholders. We reviewed the 58 landings reports published from 1929 to 2020 and extracted and carefully curated 13 datasets with long time series and wide public interest. These datasets include: (1) annual landings in pounds and value by port and s...