Sea Around Us: North Atlantic, Page 81 Estimating Illegal and Unreported Catches from Marine Ecosystems: Two Case Studies

• Main Authors: Robyn Forrest, Tony J. Pitcher, Reg Watson, Hreiðar Þór Valtýsson
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.560.7632; http://www.ecomarres.com/downloads/forrest.pdf

Estimation of total harvests of marine organisms is es-sential if true impacts of fisheries are to be evaluated. Such estimates are difficult to obtain because, for many of the world's fisheries, an unknown proportion of the catch is not reported. Components of the unreported catch may include discards, deliberately misreported catch and unmandated catch (catch that it is not re-quired to be reported). For many fisheries, estimates of misreporting or discarding exist, but may not apply to all periods of interest. Here we demonstrate a method-ology for estimating unreported catches over time, based on knowledge of factors that influence misre-porting in the fishery and on independent (published and unpublished) estimates of misreporting. Inde-