Cumulative and average fishing hours in the Mediterranean, Black and North-east Atlantic for the period 2015-2020

Fishing effort data publicly accessible thought the Global Fishing Watch (GFW) site (GFW, 2022) have been used to investigate the spatiotemporal distribution of fishing activities in a wide area (Latitude: 30.7°N - 66°N; Longitude: 14.4°W - 41.9°E).

Daily fishing effort data by flag state and vessel class at 0.01° resolution, from 2015 to 2020, have been filtered and aggregated to obtain fishing effort information of six main gear categories. Categories were created by aggregation of the following vessel classes: fixed gears (pots and traps, set longlines, set gillnets and fixed gear), purse seines (purse seines, tuna purse seines and other purse seines), trawlers (trawlers), drifting longlines (drifting longlines), dredge (dredge fishing) and other (pole and line, fishing, trollers, seiners, other seines and squid jigger). Data were aggregated to obtain cumulative (fahs) and average (mfahs) fishing hours by fishing category at 0.1° and 0.5° resolution.

Maps of fishing activity for each gear have been created for eight main areas at 0.1° (Adriatic Sea, Aegean Sea, Balearic Sea, Baltic Sea, Bay of Biscay, Black Sea, Levantine Sea and North Sea) and at Mediterranean and Atlantic level at 0.5°.

The dataset presented includes for each gear spatial layers of the cumulative and average fishing hours at 0.1° and 0.5° resolution (.shp; .csv) and maps of each case study area.