The two studies that form this document are based on the data held in the FAO capture fisheries production database, for which species items have been classified as oceanic or living on the continental shelves. A preliminary work on the feasibility of the re-arrangement of FAO capture data into Large Marine Ecosystems’ borders was prepared in September 1999 with reference to a visit to FAO by Prof. Sherman, one of the leading authors on this subject. However, the work to re-assign the FAO capture statistics organized by 19 marine fishing areas into the 50 LMEs proved to be quite complex and time consuming. Regional sub-sets of the national data reported by some countries had to be retrieved from national publications and web sites, compared with the data already in the FAO database and computerized. Some LMEs had to be excluded from this exercise, as relevant data are not available. For these reasons, the data retrieved cover only a limited period of 10 years (1990-99). Given these limitations, the analysis of the statistics by LME, rather than focusing on changes in the catch trends, has aimed to identify similarities among the LMEs’ catch patterns, to provide an insight to the fishery characteristics of the LMEs which have already been extensively studied for their ecological and oceanographic conditions.
While the work on LMEs was in progress, the World Resources Institute (WRI) offered to fund the FAO Fishery Information, Data and Statistics Unit (FIDI) to undertake a study on oceanic fisheries based on the data contained in the FAO fishery statistics databases. Oceanic species in the FAO capture database were identified and subdivided into epipelagic and deep-water species. The complete report, also including analyses of other FIDI statistics on oceanic fishers and fishing vessels, was delivered to WRI in September 2001. As a consequence of the completion of this work, it was decided to revise the species included in the LME project, excluding those categorized as oceanic to obtain two complete separate sets of species items from the FAO capture database. The species included in the LME study are those classified as spending most of their life cycle on the continental shelf whereas the species categorized as oceanic are those living beyond the shelf. The section of the report to WRI on trends of oceanic catches, analysed over a 50-year period (1950-99) and by FAO fishing area, is published here with some modifications thanks to an agreement between FAO and WRI which allows both institutions to disseminate the results of the study separately.
