Global annual catch of tuna, tuna-like and shark species (1918-2015) (IRD level 0)

This dataset lists global catch of tuna and tuna-like species from 1918 to 2015. Catches are stratified by year, species, fishing gear, vessel flag reporting country, area (essentially the tuna RFMOs areas of management). This dataset was computed using public domain catch-and-effort datasets released by the five tuna Regional Fisheries Management Organizations: the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC), the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC), the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna (CCSBT).

IRD Level 0 stands for the processes applied to the primary datasets by the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD) to generate the dataset. These processes for level 0 at global scale are :

- Merging of the primary nominal (also called total) catch datasets released by the 5 tuna RFMOs.
- For the Southern Bluefin Tuna, only data from the the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna (CCSBT) was kept (i.e. data from the other RFMOs for SBF was removed).
- Original code lists have been mapped with standard FAO code lists (for gears, species, flags). These mappings have been done in collaboration with the RFMOs secretariats.

More details on the processes are provided in the lineage section.

Caracteristics, specific issues and problems that need to be taken into account :

In addition to the respective specific issues of all the tuna RFMOs datasets, the following issues might be taken into account :
- Catches in the Pacific ocean are over-estimated. In fact, IATTC and WCPFC, who report the data respectively for the Eastern Pacific and Western Pacific oceans, have an overlapping area in their respective area of competence. Data from both RFMOs may be redundant in this overlapping zone.
- Geographical stratification in this dataset is : major FAO fishing area for the Indian ocean (IOTC), sampling areas for the Atlantic ocean (ICCAT), whole areas of competence of the respective RFMOs for the Pacific ocean (IATTC and WCPFC), area of competence of the CCSBT for the Southern Bluefin tuna.