Data from the Interim Report "The spatial distribution of commercial fishery production in the Northwest Shelf of Australia, 1973 to 1997" (NWS JEMS Task 2.6)

The data was summarised to produce an interim report to describe the trawling effort and total catch in the North West Shelf of Australia between 1973 and 1997. It contains foreign and domestic commercial fisheries data from three separate sources: Taiwanese Logbook data (Anon. 1973-1982), foreign (Taiwanese, Chinese and South Korean) trawl data collated by the Australian Fisheries Management Authority (1979-1989), and domestic catch and effort statistics data collated by Fisheries, Western Australia (1979-1997). Trawling effort and total catch by year, as well as catches of 22 species categories (mostly family level classifications) are sumarised spatially into a 10x10 minute grid scale over part of the NWS region to show spatial distribution. The original Report produced Mar 2001 was updated and corrected in 2003. The corrections made are: (1) the Taiwaneses total catch was recalculated using all categories reported in the Annual reports (previously invertebrates, 'dumped' and 'other' were excluded); (2)Taiwanese effort data was corrected for logbook recovery rates reported in the Annual Reports. The update refers to an additional section describing the data that was used in NWS-JEMS Project 5.