ISSF expands interactive tuna tool with gear data

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...

Photo courtesy of Rich Carey/Shutterstock