Spatially explicit estimates of stock size, structure and biomass of North Atlantic albacore tuna (Thunnus alalunga) in the North Atlantic for the period 1987-2011, compiled from statistics about ICCAT fishery region L6

The development of the ecosystem approach and models for the management of ocean marine resources requires easy access to standard validated datasets of historical catch data for the main exploited species. They are used to measure the impact of biomass removal by fisheries and to evaluate the models skills, while the use of standard dataset facilitates models inter-comparison. North Atlantic albacore tuna is exploited all year round by longline and in summer and autumn by surface fisheries and fishery statistics compiled by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). Catch and effort with geographical coordinates at monthly spatial resolution of 1° or 5° squares were extracted for this species with a careful definition of fisheries and data screening. In total, thirteen fisheries were defined for the period 1956-2010, with fishing gears longline, troll, mid-water trawl and bait fishing. However, the spatialized catch effort data available in ICCAT database represent a fraction of the entire total catch. Length frequencies of catch were also extracted according to the definition of fisheries above for the period 1956-2010 with a quarterly temporal resolution and spatial resolutions varying from 1°x 1° to 10°x 20°. The resolution used to measure the fish also varies with size-bins of 1, 2 or 5 cm (Fork Length). The screening of data allowed detecting inconsistencies with a relatively large number of samples larger than 150 cm while all studies on the growth of albacore suggest that fish rarely grow up over 130 cm. Therefore, a threshold value of 130 cm has been arbitrarily fixed and all length frequency data above this value removed from the original data set.

This work was funded in part by the European project EURO-BASIN, funded by Framework Programme 7 (Contract 264933). Special thanks to ICCAT for the access to its public fishing database and Carlos Palma (ICCAT) and Alain Fonteneau (IRD) for their helpful advice on these data.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.828230
PID https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.42942.d001
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.830797
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-6-317-2014
Related Identifier https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.42942.d002
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.828230
Provenance
Creator Lehodey, Patrick ORCID logo; Senina, Inna ORCID logo; Dragon, Anne-Cécile; Arrizabalaga, Haritz ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Contributor Collecte Localisation Satellites
Publication Year 2014
Funding Reference Seventh Framework Programme https://doi.org/10.13039/100011102 Crossref Funder ID 264933 https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/264933 Basin Scale Analysis, Synthesis and Integration
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 6927 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (-77.500W, 17.500S, 17.500E, 52.500N)
Temporal Coverage Begin 1987-01-15T00:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2011-12-15T00:00:00Z