Annual retained catches allocated between the high seas and National Jurisdiction Areas, 1950–2021

This dataset contains estimates of historical catch data for albacore, bigeye tuna, skipjack tuna, swordfish, and yellowfin tuna, stratified by year, fleet, gear, school type, species, and assigned area (either a National Jurisdiction Area or the high seas), covering the period from 1950 to 2021.

The dataset correspond to the catches presented at the thirtheen session of the Technical Committee on Allocation Criteria (TCAC13) and currently included in the interactive simulation tool developed to facilitate the exploration of various configuration options for the components of catch allocation outlined in the Draft Allocation Regime (v7), presented at the 13^th session of the TCAC (IOTC-2024-TCAC13-REF02). The tool is an interactive R Shiny web application, available at https://foodandagricultureorganization.shinyapps.io/iotc-tcac-simulations/. The App is password-protected to support access control and monitoring, with login credentials provided to participating delegates. To ensure full transparency and reproducibility, all scripts and data used to generate the Shiny App are available in the iotc-tcac-simulations repository, hosted on the IOTC Secretariat’s GitHub.

The fields of the catch dataset are described in Appendix 3 of document IOTC-2025-TCAC15-INF02.

The method used to categorise catches by area of operation was presented to the TCAC at its twelfth meeting in October 2023 and endorsed by participants (IOTC-2023-TCAC12-INF02). For longline and surface fisheries operating on the high seas, catches were allocated to NJAs based on the proportion of spatial overlap between each regular grid cell and the corresponding NJA (see IOTC–2017–SC20–INF05).