Reconstruction of North Sea trawling effort 1985-2015

notPlanned

For the 31-year period from 1985 to 2015, we collated or estimated data on total (demersal) otter and beam trawling effort per year for the North Sea, defined as ICES Sub-area IV. Specifically, the effort was quantified as number of hours fishing in a year per ICES rectangle. For each year we compiled data on trawling effort by vessels landing in Belgium, Denmark, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Scotland and Sweden, which are the most significant contributors to trawling effort in the region. Where data for a particular country and year was missing it was estimated, based on the spatial distribution of trawling effort by that same country in other periods, and on the average percentage contribution of the trawling effort by that country to the total. For each year and ICES rectangle the dataset specifies "Compiled" and "Estimated" effort, and additionally provides a "Reconstructed" effort which is the sum of the two. Sources for compiled effort data include the STECF (Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries), the MAFCONS Project (Managing Fisheries to Conserve Groundfish and Benthic Invertebrate Species Diversity), datasets from scientific publications, and national databases for England, Scotland and Denmark. Following feedback on manuscript “Couce, E., Schratzberger, M., and Engelhard, G. H.: Reconstructing three decades of total international trawling effort in the North Sea, Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss, `https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2019-90`_, in review, 2019”, the dataset has been updated to include an estimation of errors for the reconstructed total trawling. Additionally the method for estimating missing data has been refined, leading to small variations throughout the period, and beam trawling data for the period 1997-2002 has suffered significant changes, as German trawling data is now estimated due to shrimp trawling activity being missing in the MAFCONS dataset for Germany that was used in the previous version. .. _`https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2019-90`: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2019-90