The Fish Catch Effort database contains catch effort data from a variety of species that have been groomed as part of the stock assessment process.

Sampling frequency: variable.

Data are from 1981.

Number of sites: variable.

Extent of site: entire EEZ (and sometimes beyond). Lat/Lon provided for all data.

Measured variables: Information collected from commercial fishers describing their day to day fishing activities. Includes catch, fishing method, fishing locations, vessel ID and fisher ID.

Sampling protocol & QA: Information collected from commercial fishers describing their day to day fishing activities. No QA.Commercial fishers are required, by New Zealand law, to supply the Ministry with commercial catch effort information. Put simply - catch effort information provides details on what the commercial fisher’s caught, where, when and how.

Commercial fishers supply approximately 170,000 pages of such information each year. The Ministry operates a large catch_effort database ("warehou")that stores catch effort information describing commercial fishing from 1990 onwards. A separate database called "new_fsu" stores commercial catch effort data from the 1980s. In general, the existence of Catch Effort data is not documented elsewhere within the MPI website (exceptions are subsets of Catch Effort data which have been groomed as part of individual scientific research projects, which can be stored either on CD or in the fish_ce database). The best place to find information on the MPI catch_effort and new_fsu data is the Ministry’s Research Data Management group ([email protected] ). You should also consider requesting a copy of the “Catch Effort reference library” CD. This CD contains a very extensive set of metadata and background information describing the collection, processing, storage and management of Catch Effort data, including tables of how much data is available for each species, fishing method, area etc.

Note that in many other countries catch effort data are referred to as “logbook” or “catch logbook” data.

Fishing methods included in these data: bottom trawl, midwater trawl, bottom longline