fishstat-package: Global Fishery and Aquaculture Statistics

In fishstat: Global Fishery and Aquaculture Statistics

Global Fishery and Aquaculture Statistics

Description

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) FishStat database is the leading source of global fishery and aquaculture statistics and provides unique information for sector analysis and monitoring.

This package provides the global production data from all fisheries and aquaculture in R format, ready for analysis.

Details

Production tables:

aquaculture	aquaculture production
capture	capture production
production	aquaculture and capture production

Lookup tables:

area	fishing areas
country	countries and territories
environment	aquaculture environments
measure	units of measurement
source	sources of production
species	taxonomic groups
status	status of data entries

Note

The data in the package were downloaded from the FAO data server and imported into R. The R package version indicates the version of FishStat data it includes. Column names have been simplified to facilitate quick exploration and plotting in R.

Production tables can be joined with lookup tables using the merge function, as demonstrated in the help page examples for production tables. The column names in the R package have been designed to allow automatic inference of which columns to join, and the resulting table will have unique column names.

To achieve a small memory footprint and fast computations, one can filter or aggregate rows and select columns of interest before joining tables, as demonstrated in the capture and production examples. On the other hand, for the sake of convenience, one can also construct a full table with all data records and all columns. The resulting table will have many rows and columns, but most computers will handle these without problems:

prod.all <- merge(merge(merge(merge(merge(merge(production,
                  area), country), measure), source), species), status)
cap.all <- merge(merge(merge(merge(merge(capture,
                 area), country), measure), species), status)
aqua.all <- merge(merge(merge(merge(merge(merge(aquaculture,
                  area), country), environment), measure), species), status)

When aggregating data, simple utility functions can be handy for tasks like rounding the sum of thousands/millions of tonnes:

sum3 <- function(x, digits=0) round(sum(x)/1e3, digits=digits)
sum6 <- function(x, digits=0) round(sum(x)/1e6, digits=digits)
aggregate(value~environment, aquaculture, sum6)
aggregate(value~area, capture, sum6, subset=measure=="Q_tlw", digits=1)

An effort has been made to describe each table in the corresponding R help page. However, the official and authoritative documentation of the FishStat database is found on the FAO FishStat website.

The example below demonstrates how the FishStat data can be used to produce an overview of global fisheries and aquaculture. The combination of FishStat and the R environment can also be very efficient for analyses that focus on selected areas, countries, species, and/or taxonomic groups.

Author(s)

Arni Magnusson and Rishi Sharma created this R package.

All credit for the FishStat database goes to the Statistics Team of the FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Division, as well as national data submitters. The database terms of use are based on the CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO license. The R package is released under a similar CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

To cite the use of FishStat data:

FAO. [Year]. FishStat data. Fisheries and Aquaculture Division. Rome. https://www.fao.org/fishery/en/fishstat.

To cite the use of this R package to access the data, cite FishStat (above) as well as:

Magnusson, A. and R. Sharma. [Year]. fishstat: Global Fishery and Aquaculture Statistics. R package version [Version]. https://cran.r-project.org/package=fishstat.

See Also

Useful links:

• https://www.fao.org/fishery/en/fishstat

• https://github.com/sofia-taf/fishstat

Examples

head(production)

# Analyze production measured in tonnes
prod <- production[production$measure == "Q_tlw" & production$value > 0,]
prod <- merge(prod, species[c("species", "yearbook")])

# Select SOFIA species, excluding mammals, reptiles, and plants
prod <- prod[prod$yearbook ==
             "Aquatic animals (Fish, crustaceans and molluscs, etc.)",]

# Determine origin
prod <- merge(prod, area[c("area", "inlandmarine")])
prod$origin <- ifelse(prod$source == "CAPTURE", "Capture", "Aquaculture")
prod$w <- ifelse(prod$inlandmarine == "Marine areas", "marine", "inland")
prod$origin <- paste0(prod$origin, " (", prod$w, ")")

# World capture fisheries and aquaculture production
x <- xtabs(value~year+origin, aggregate(value~year+origin, prod, sum))
x <- x[,c(2,1,4,3)] / 1e6
library(areaplot)
areaplot(x, legend=TRUE, args.legend=list(x="topleft"), ylab="million tonnes")

fishstat documentation built on April 11, 2025, 5:50 p.m.