Technical Report 128

Catalogue of Defra historical catch and effort charts: six decades of detailed spatial statistics for British fisheries

This report describes an inventory of over 37,000 unpublished historical ‘Statistical Charts’ held at the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas), Lowestoft, UK. These charts provide annual and monthly fisheries statistics at a fine spatial scale for the period 1913-81 (excluding both World Wars). More specifically, they show the annual and monthly landings and catch rates per fish species, and the fishing effort for various components of the British commercial fishing fleet. These values are indicated separately for each rectangle of 1° longitude by 30' latitude (equivalent to ICES rectangles) as well as for the entire area charted (generally equivalent to ICES fishing areas). The largest subset of charts covers the North Sea (both pre- and post-war years); smaller but still substantial subsets of charts cover the Faroe Grounds, Iceland, West of Scotland and Rockall, the Irish and Celtic Seas and English Channel (post-war years). The focus is on demersal fisheries, with only a small proportion of charts devoted to pelagic fisheries. Combined, this set of ‘Statistical Charts’ provides consistent, standardised data over a considerable time-span, for Britain’s former and current fishing grounds, covering an important portion of the fishing history of this nation.

• Technical Report 128 (PDF 420KB)
• Electronic appendix: Excel files (Zip containing Excel files, 403KB)