The spatial distribution of commercial fishery production on Australia's North West Shelf

Created 23/06/2025

Updated 23/06/2025

Foreign and domestic commercial fisheries data from three separate sources were used to describe the trawling effort and total catch in the North West Shelf of Australia between 1973 and 1997. These are 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 are presented in time series plots and in thematic maps describing their spatial distribution over part of the NWS region on a 10 by 10 minute grid scale. Furthermore the data was divided into 22 species categories (mostly family level classifications) and presented as separate time series of the catches for each of these. Yearly distribution maps of the proportion of each species category over the total catch within each 10 by 10 minute grid are also presented. In addition is the reconstruction and description of what is regarded as the most reasonable and likely record of the historical catch and effort for the commercial fisheries operating on the North West Shelf, by the authors. These interpretations were based mainly on the data sets reviewed here, but also included additional information obtained directly from Taiwan during projects in the mid 1990s. Reconstruction of some historical catches is at a finer taxonomic resolution than is provided in the original data. This reconstruction of the historical catch, and effort data for the fishery, was used in the North West Shelf Joint Environmental Management Study (NWSJEMS) Project 5 to model fish populations and evaluate fishery management strategies.

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Additional Info

Field Value
Title The spatial distribution of commercial fishery production on Australia's North West Shelf
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/21f9e314-e7e9-496c-9525-b816026d3783
Contact Point
Australian Ocean Data Network
franzis.althaus@csiro.au
Reference Period 01/01/1973 - 30/12/1997
Geospatial Coverage
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors
{
  "coordinates": [
    [
      [
        114.0,
        -24.0
      ],
      [
        122.0,
        -24.0
      ],
      [
        122.0,
        -17.0
      ],
      [
        114.0,
        -17.0
      ],
      [
        114.0,
        -24.0
      ]
    ]
  ],
  "type": "Polygon"
}
Data Portal Australian Oceans Data Network

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on Australian Oceans Data Network "The spatial distribution of commercial fishery production on Australia's North West Shelf". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://catalogue.aodn.org.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/csw/dataset/the-spatial-distribution-of-commercial-fishery-production-on-australias-north-west-shelf