Title: IOTC–OFCF Data mining mission to Thailand (23–27 June 2014)

The IOTC Scientific Committee and IOTC Working Party on Neritic Tunas has noted a number of IOTC Contracting Parties – including Thailand – have collected large data sets on neritic tuna species but have either not yet reported data to the IOTC according to the standards set by  IOTC Resolution 10/02 Mandatory statistical requirements for IOTC Members and Cooperating Non-Contracting Parties (CPCs) or have not yet assessed the value of using the data collected to estimate indices of abundance for neritic tuna species.

A data mining mission to Thailand was conducted by the IOTC Secretariat (Mr. James Geehan) and the IOTC-OFCF Project Manager (Mr. Koichi Sakonju) between 23–27 June 2014, which included visits to the Department of Fisheries (DoF) and SEAFDEC, Bangkok, and the Andaman Sea Fisheries Research and Development Center (AFRDEC), Phuket.

The overall aims of the mission were to:

       (i.) strengthen the quality of catch statistics collected by Thailand and indices of abundance related to neritic tunas;
       (ii.) facilitate the reporting of data by Thailand to the IOTC Secretariat related to the mandatory datasets required by IOTC Resolution 10/02.

Main recommendations
The mission made a number of recommendations to Thailand to further improve their data collection and reporting systems, including:

        • Catch-and-effort: Reporting effort in a common unit of measurement (e.g., number of fishing trips, or fishing hours) to estimate the nominal CPUE over the complete catch-and-effort time series available since the early 1970s.
        • Size frequency data: Submission of historical size frequency data to the IOTC Secretariat – collected by AFRDEC and available electronically since 2004 – to improve compliance with the IOTC Resolution 10/02 mandatory statistical requirements.
        • Nominal catch: Revise the nominal catch to estimate the catch-by-species for aggregated species groups (e.g., comparison of available data sources such as log book survey and port sampling collected by DoF and AFRDEC).
        • Catch per unit effort (CPUE): Analyze operational level data collected by DoF and AFRDEC by mode of fishing (e.g., FADs, light luring, sonar) for the coastal purse seine fleet, and evaluate the extent to which abundance signals vary according to coastal purse seine type, with priority given to the CPUE of vessels directly targeting neritic tunas in to order to improve the accuracy of estimates of levels of abundance.
        • Reporting of IOTC datasets:  Improve the coordination between DoF and AFRDEC to ensure datasets related to IOTC Resolution 10/02, including size .frequency data, are submitted.  Ensure data reported by Thailand is also privded to the IOTC Secretariat in electronic format to facilitate the processing of data, in addition to hard-copy format if preferred.