North Sea Trawling Effort Reconstruction from 1985 to 2015

Reconstruction of North Sea trawling effort 1985-2015 provides a spatial distribution of total international otter and beam trawling fishing effort. The dataset covers a 31-year time span and is structured by ICES rectangles, which are 0.5 degree latitude by 1 degree longitude cells. It was largely reconstructed using compiled effort data from 7 fishing effort time-series and completed by estimations of missing data.

Use Cases

• Modeling historical fishing pressure on marine habitats based on reconstructed spatial effort data.
• Analyzing trends in trawling intensity over a 31-year period.
• Assessing the spatial footprint of international fishing fleets within ICES rectangles.
• Estimating missing data points in fisheries time-series using the described completion method.

Strengths

• Covers a 31-year time span from 1985 to 2015, providing a long-term perspective.
• Spatially explicit data organized by standardized ICES rectangles (0.5°x1°).
• Reconstructed from 7 compiled fishing effort time-series, suggesting a multi-source foundation.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for specific modeling tasks.
• Data includes estimations for missing values, which introduces a degree of uncertainty.

Provenance

Source

Government Digital Service

Collection Method

Reconstructed from compiled effort data from 7 time-series, with estimations for missing data.

Time Range

1985 to 2015

Freshness

Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Geography

North Sea, covering all ICES rectangles