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 species from 1941 to 2019; (2) annual number of commercial
fishing vessels by length class from 1934 to 2020; (3) annual number of
licensed commercial fishers by area of residence from 1916 to 2020; and
(4) annual number of party boat (CPFV) vessels, anglers, and their total
catch by species from 1936 to 2020. Notably, we harmonized port names,
species common names, and species scientific names across all years and
datasets. We make these curated datasets, collectively called the CALFISH
database, publicly available to any interested stakeholder in the
supplementary materials of this paper, on an open-access data-repository,
and in the wcfish R package. These datasets can be used
(1) to understand the historical context of California's fisheries;
(2) for original research requiring only summaries of historical landings
and participation data; and (3) to anticipate the likely characteristics
of confidential data requested from the state. We conclude the paper by
identifying key principles for increasing the accessibility and utility of
historical fisheries landings and participation data.