Abstract
The only available data set on the catches of global fisheries are the official landings reported annually by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Attempts to detect and interpret trends in these data have been criticized as being both technically and conceptually flawed. Here, we explore and refute these claims. We show explicitly that trends in catch data are not an artifact of the applied method and are consistent with trends in biomass data of fully assessed stocks. We also show that, while comprehensive stock assessments are the preferred method for evaluating single stocks, they are a biased subsample of the stocks in a given area, strongly underestimating the percentage of collapsed stocks. We concur with a recent assessment-based analysis by FAO that the increasing trends in the percentage of overexploited, depleted, and recovering stocks and the decreasing trends in underexploited and moderately exploited stocks give cause for concern. We show that these trends are much more pronounced if all available data are considered.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the numerous reviewers for forcing us to back up our points with data. We thank the editors of Marine Biology for publishing this study, which evolved from two short responses into quite an elaborate document. Rainer Froese wishes to thank the Future Ocean Excellence Cluster 80, funded by the German Research Foundation on behalf of the German Federal State and State Governments. Daniel Pauly, Kristin Kleisner, and Dirk Zeller acknowledge support from the Sea Around Us Project, a collaboration between the University of British Columbia and the Pew Environment Group. We thank Boris Worm for comments on an early version of this manuscript.
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Froese, R., Zeller, D., Kleisner, K. et al. What catch data can tell us about the status of global fisheries. Mar Biol 159, 1283–1292 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-012-1909-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-012-1909-6