Landings by foreign vessels in US waters

library(comlandr)

Landings in US waters by foreign vessels are reported to NAFO. This data is obtained directly from NAFOs website using get_foreign_data().

• Details regarding the types of data available see vignette("ForeignCatch").
• For details regarding the reporting areas, the countries reporting and the species caught see vignette("ForeignCatchCompare21A21B")

Data from NAFO require considerable processing and several assumptions are made before merging with the US landings data from STOCKEFF.

• The spatial domain for reporting does not fully overlap with the statistical areas in which US data is reported.
• Species codes and names differ between the two data sets

Processing steps

• US data is removed
• Data with missing MONTH field are assigned, MONTH = 0 and QY= 1
• Data is aggregated over country codes
• Data is filtered to keep only Division codes = c(47, 51:56, 61:63) (See vignette("ForeignCatchCompare21A21B"))
• Missing data from 21B data is substituted with 21A and assigned MONTH = 0 and QY= 1
• cfdbs.CFSPP lookup table is used to match NAFO species codes with NESPP3 codes
  • Codes present in the NAFO data but not defined in lookup tables are matched manually
  • NAFO species codes used as catch alls, for example Groundfish (Not specified), are assigned to corresponding NESPP3 codes
• All shellfish are reported as live weight. A conversion to meat weight is applied if useLanded is supplied.
• Herring data is removed (since the State of Maine database account for ALL Herring landings, see vignette("landingsHerring"))
• cfdbs.GEAR lookup table is used to match NAFO gears with NEGEAR codes
  • Mismatched codes are then manually adjusted
• Vessel tonnage class codes in NAFO data are matched to TONCL2 codes.
• Additional missing fields (SPPVALUE,UTILCD, MESHCAT,MARKET_CODE) are set to missing