Global datasets for tuna fisheries

Assessing the status of tuna and tuna-like populations for providing management advice requires the analysis of multiple data sets collected by the contracting parties and cooperating non-contracting parties of Tuna Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (tRFMOs) Conventions. Data on the magnitude and composition of landings, discards, and fishing effort are currently managed at basin scale by the Secretariats of the tRFMOs. Consequently, data formats and reference codes have evolved rather independently despite some links with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Coordinating Working Party on Fishery Statistics. In a paper presented in 2016 at the IOTC WPDSC12 (WPDCS12-27), we had introduced the global harmonized database for tuna fisheries that we have developed by collating the public domain datasets (total catch, monthly-spatially aggregated catch and effort) from the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC), the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), the Western-Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) and the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna (CCSBT). We had as well introduced the set of open source codes (the "toolbox") to handle the data, i.e. transform the data formats, load the standardized data into the database, and compute a suite of indicators. However, the project - both the data and the toolbox - was still at an early stage of development. Details on the benefits of this global database for fisheries science and management, as well as technical details on the database, were also exposed in previous papers (ICCAT SCRS/2016/202). In this paper, we expose the progresses that we have made in 2017. We first present the diversity of data that are available in the open database, and we then focus on the tools that we have developed to access and exploit efficiently the data