Studying and understanding the trajectory see more of changes in the marine environment induced by anthropocentric activities, and particularly fishing, is important to formulating marine policy. Here changes that have occurred since global catch statistics began to be published annually in the 1950s are explored. The fishing landing data were sourced from the Sea Around Us project [12] and [13], as compiled from a range of sources including the FAO fisheries database, supplemented by regional datasets, and augmented in a few cases, with reconstructed datasets, e.g., from [22]. It is quality-checked,

and mapped to a system of 30′ by 30′ spatial cells using a rule-based approach based on original spatial information, the access of fleets to coastal waters (through reports or explicit access agreements), and the distribution of the reported fish marine taxa, as inferred

from geography and habitat affinities in FishBase [23] for fishes, and SeaLifeBase [24] for invertebrates [25]. Fishing effort data was sourced from the Sea Around Us project [17]. This data was standardized and collated, based on engine power (Watts) and fishing days [16] from a range of public domain sources including the FAO’s Coordinated Working Party on Fisheries Statistics (FAO-CWS), and European Union Common Fishing Policy Statistics (EU) for non-tuna fishing, the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC), Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC) and FAO’s Atlas of Tuna and Billfish for www.selleckchem.com/products/azd4547.html tuna fishing (FAO-Atlas), and the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) for fishing effort in the Antarctic region. The resultant harmonized global dataset was mapped to 30′

by 30′ spatial cells using a variety of processes, depending on spatial information present in the original sources. The data from SCP, ICCAT, IATTC, IOTC, FAO-Atlas, and the CCAMLR data provided spatial information, whereas, the FAO-CWS and EU statistics did not, and thus required further spatial Fluorometholone Acetate modelling. Fishing effort was first apportioned to fleet-accessible ports, then mapped to spatial cells in adjacent waters using a two-scale gravity-model, based on the value of mapped landings taken from surrounding waters based on modelled landings from the Sea Around Us project’s databases. Global fisheries (landings and effort) data by continents were used to produce cartograms, i.e., maps where the land area of each continent was made proportional to some interesting quantity (here: catch weight and fishing effort). For this, ESRI’s ArcMap 10 Cartogram Geoprocessing Tool Ver 2 [26] was used. The global distributions of fisheries landings in the 1950s and early to mid-2000s are shown in Fig. 1.