Reconstructing three decades of total international trawling effort in the North Sea

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Couce, Elena, Schratzberger, Michaela and Engelhard, Georg (2020) Reconstructing three decades of total international trawling effort in the North Sea. Earth System Science Data, 12. 373–386. ISSN 1866-3508

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Abstract

Fishing – especially trawling – is one of the most ubiquitous anthropogenic pressures on marine ecosystems worldwide, yet very few long-term, spatially explicit datasets on trawling effort exist; this greatly hampers our understanding of the medium- to long-term impact of trawling. This important gap is addressed here for the North Sea, a highly productive shelf sea which is also subject to many anthropogenic pressures. For a 31-year time span (1985–2015), we provide a gridded dataset of the spatial distribution of total international otter and beam trawling effort, with a resolution of 0.5∘ latitude by 1∘ longitude, over the North Sea. The dataset was largely reconstructed using compiled effort data from seven fishing effort time series, each covering shorter time spans and only some of the countries fishing the North Sea. For the years where effort data for particular countries were missing, the series was complemented using estimated (modelled) effort data. This new, long-term and large-scale trawling dataset may serve the wider scientific community, as well as those involved with policy and management, as a valuable information source on fishing pressure in a large marine ecosystem which is heavily impacted but which simultaneously provides a wealth of ecosystem services to society. The dataset is available on the Cefas Data Hub at: https://doi.org/10.14466/CefasDataHub.61, version 2 (Couce et al., 2019).

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: Financial support: This research has been supported by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs of the UK (Defra) via project SLA44 (Marine Biodiversity Advice) and jointly by Defra and by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) via grant NE/L003279/1 (Marine Ecosystems Research Programme).
Uncontrolled Keywords: earth and planetary sciences(all),sdg 14 - life below water ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1900
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Collaborative Centre for Sustainable Use of the Seas
Related URLs:
Depositing User: LivePure Connector
Date Deposited: 24 May 2022 14:58
Last Modified: 22 Oct 2022 18:32
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/85083
DOI: 10.5194/essd-12-373-2020

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