Commercial salmon harvest data, 1882-2016

Commercial harvest data of salmon are available from the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission, however, depending on the resolution of these data, some years in some fisheries are confidential to protect the identity of the fishers and processors working in that fishery. In some cases, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG) is granted a waiver by those fishers and processors to published annual data at the commercial fishing area level in annual reports. In an effort to analyze whether trends in confidentiality levels would skew commercial harvest data sourced directly from the CFEC, commercial harvest data were compiled from reports for all regions of Alaska except Prince William Sound, Southeast, and the Arctic. The data was taken from annual salmon fishery management reports, provided by the Alaska Department of Fish & Game, Division of Sport Fish and Commercial Fisheries (http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/sf/publications/). The data from Prince William Sound and Southeast Alaska were not included because the amount of fishers and processors in these regions rarely result in confidential data; the Arctic region was not included due to the lack of commercial fisheries. This dataset includes the original reports as pdf files, the data extracted from the reports, an R markdown file that reformats and compiles the extracted data (CommercialHarvest_Reports.Rmd), and the reformatted data (Commercial_Harvest_Reports.csv). Commercial salmon harvests were categorized in numbers of each fish species by year. In the reformatted dataset, areas were combined and renamed to corresponding SASAP regions, and some data removed to ensure that combined areas had consistent temporal coverage.