Journal
MARINE BIOLOGY
Volume 159, Issue 6, Pages 1283-1292Publisher
SPRINGER HEIDELBERG
DOI: 10.1007/s00227-012-1909-6
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Funding
- German Research Foundation on behalf of the German Federal State Government
- University of British Columbia
- Pew Environment Group
- German Research Foundation on behalf of the German State Government
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The only available data set on the catches of global fisheries are the official landings reported annually by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Attempts to detect and interpret trends in these data have been criticized as being both technically and conceptually flawed. Here, we explore and refute these claims. We show explicitly that trends in catch data are not an artifact of the applied method and are consistent with trends in biomass data of fully assessed stocks. We also show that, while comprehensive stock assessments are the preferred method for evaluating single stocks, they are a biased subsample of the stocks in a given area, strongly underestimating the percentage of collapsed stocks. We concur with a recent assessment-based analysis by FAO that the increasing trends in the percentage of overexploited, depleted, and recovering stocks and the decreasing trends in underexploited and moderately exploited stocks give cause for concern. We show that these trends are much more pronounced if all available data are considered.
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