Pacific Sleeper Shark. Photo by NOAA.
Bottom trawling is causing “boom and bust” fisheries.
A new study using the Sea Around Us’ reconstructed catch data reveals that in the past 60+ years, the practice of towing giant fishing nets along the sea floor has caused the extraction of 25 million tonnes of fish that live 400 metres or more below sea level leading to the collapse of many of those fish populations.
Catch reconstructions are not always easy to explain to non-scientists.
How did the Sea Around Us find out that overfishing has caused a steady decline in catches since the mid-1990s? What sources did researchers use? What’s the difference between officially reported figures and the Sea Around Us’ numbers?
More accurate data substantially improves fisheries monitoring and, in return, better monitoring generates better data. The overall result would be a greater protection to global fish stocks.
This is how we get #BetterData
Women comprise about 47 per cent of the 120 million people who work in the capture fisheries and post-harvest sectors, says the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Is there a connection between countries’ human development, fisheries data and the way ocean resources are managed? There is one (or many), indeed.
Text by Fabien Bourinet – Agrocampus Ouest, Rennes, France.
The deliverables of my five-month internship with the Sea Around Us, at UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, included establishing strong links between the area-specific catch and related data made available by the Sea Around Us and the ecosystem food-web models in Ecobase. I played the role of a middleman whose job was to improve the communication between these two websites and the information they contain.