The International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) has added a new feature to its interactive Stock Status Tool, allowing users to analyze annual tuna catches by gear type.
The Stock Status Tool is publicly available on ISSF’s websites and draws on the foundation’s “Status of the Stocks” report, a semi-annual publication that collects and analyzes data from the tuna regional fisheries management organizations (RFMO). When it was introduced in 2018, the new tool enabled stakeholders to track the health status of tuna stocks from 2011 onward and provided the current catch share across stocks.
With the new “Catch Trends” expansion, users can now sort data sets – which date back to the 1950s – by purse-seine, pole-and-line, longline, gillnet, and other gear types. Users can customize the data further by year range, stock area, and tuna species to discover fishery trends. A query can show how the total catch in a fishery has changed over time as well as what type of gear is being used across the fleet.
The Stock Status Tool can also produce data graphics visualizing the data, which can be downloaded as images, PDFs, PowerPoint slides, and Tableau workbooks, or embedded in social media posts for sharing.
“Credible transparency and accountability across global tuna fisheries is made possible through gathering, disseminating, analyzing, and activating data that is both science-based and attainable,” ISSF President Susan Jackson said in a statement. “As a science-first organization, we are committed to making ISSF’s technical content – especially legacy publications like the Status of the Stocks report –and the research supporting it increasingly accessible and available in user-friendly formats.”
The ISSF’s latest “status of the Stocks” report, released in March 2023, found that while a greater share of the global tuna catch came from healthy stocks than in past years, the share of tuna coming from overfished stocks also increased. ISSF reported that 85 percent of the catch was sourced from stocks with a healthy level of abundance, compared to 80.5 percent in a 2022 report. Still, the share of tuna coming from overfished stocks rose from 9.2 percent to 11 percent over that same time period.
Photo courtesy of Rich Carey/Shutterstock
