Fisheries of New Zealand

Partners

Trident Systems' mission is to provide high quality fisheries research services in support of effective and efficient management of New Zealand fisheries, with the active involvement of the seafood industry and for the collective benefit of quota owners. In line with this mission, Trident Systems is the core funder of FONZ.

Trophia provides research and advice for sustainable fisheries management. Trophia initially developed FONZ as part of its research for the Ministry for Primary Industries and continues to update, maintain and upgrade this website on behalf of Trident Systems.

The Ministry for Primary Industries supports FONZ through the provision of QMS data for regular updates of fisheries summaries.

About

Scope

Fisheries of New Zealand is intended primarily as a reference. It provides graphical summaries of data from New Zealand's fisheries but does not attempt to answer the many "why" questions that arise when examining these summaries.

Fisheries of New Zealand focusses on:

segmenting the data in ways that reflect the underlying structure of commercial fishing activities; and
providing a consistent set of summaries of the patterns and trends in the data that are applied to contrasting fishing activities.

There are numerous and diverse causes for the changes seen in the data summaries including regulatory, economic and biological drivers. Fisheries of New Zealand is not intended as a scientific assessment of any of the fisheries included and does not provide explanatory analyses of the reasons for the patterns and changes seen. The factors affecting commercial fishing activities vary from area to area, species to species and method to method. For some segments descriptive text of the recent trends is included.

Segment hierarchies

Fisheries of New Zealand uses three contrasting approaches to summarize commercial fishing data into three segment types:

Activity: a group of fishing trips with similar methods, target species, locations and or catch compositions
Fleet: a group of fishing vessel-years with similar attributes, and/or activities
Stock: a group of Fishstocks with similar taxonomy and/or habitat

Each type of segment provides a natural basis for looking at different types of data:

Activities are the most appropriate basis for summarising changes in fishing methods, target species, areas and catches;
Fleets are the most appropriate basis for summarising changes in vessel specifications such as length and age;
Stocks provide the most appropriate basis for looking at aspects such as changes in quota ownership and ACE holdings.

Fisheries of New Zealand uses a hierarchy within each type of segment. This provides for summaries at various levels of data aggregation and allows the user to drill down to the level of detail that is of interest.

Understanding the graphical summaries

Explanatory notes are provided for each graph, accessed by clicking on the graph title. These notes include important warnings that the user should be aware of when interpreting the summaries.

Navigating Fisheries of New Zealand

To use Fisheries of New Zealand effectively you need to understand three basic aspects of the main Summaries page:

The pane labelled Segments at the left of the main Summaries page provides an expandable, hierarchical view of the three data segment types.
Implementation of this hierarchical view means that you should not use your browser's forward and back buttons. Instead, Fisheries of New Zealand provides a History pane which allows easy access to recently visited segments.
The different segment types have different graphical summaries, some of which are provided via a number of different views. The different views are accessed via the menu at the above the graphs:

Each Activities segment has a Patterns view which summarises data across years, and a Changes view which shows trends over time. A Links view provides shortcuts to related segments;
Each Fleet segment has only a single view;
Each Stock segment which refers to a unique Quota Management System stock has an Overview and a separate view on Quota, ACE, prices.

Data

The data summarised in Fisheries of New Zealand are primarily statutory data collected by the Ministry for Primary Industries. Trident Systems has access to these data under a confidentiality agreement which restricts how these data may be reported. Fisheries of New Zealand seeks to adhere to these restrictions and, as a result, some catch and catch rate information is censored (blacked out) in the Fisheries of New Zealand data summaries. This occurs where an insufficient number of vessels and/or permit holders are represented in a particular calculation. Please provide feedback if you have concerns about data confidentiality and privacy in Fisheries of New Zealand.

Citation

If you would like to refer to summaries presented in Fisheries of New Zealand you can use the following citation:

Bentley, N.; Langley, A.D.; Middleton, D.A.J.; Lallemand, P. (2013) Fisheries of New Zealand, 1989/90-2011/12. Retrieved from http://fonz.tridentsystems.co.nz, day month year.

Providing feedback

Suggestions for additional summaries, changes to summaries, changes to the definition of segments or for more detailed explanations are most welcome. If you notice any aspects of the summaries that appear to be wrong please let us know so we can investigate and, if necessary, amend our data grooming procedures.

Feedback is best given via the comments icons attached to each graph. Include your name and/or email address if you would like a response to your comment, but please note that these are posted to a publically accessible site. Suggestions can also be emailed to fonz@tridentsystems.co.nz.

On-going development

Trident Systems is committed to the on-going updating and development of Fisheries of New Zealand. In addition to feedback on the detail, we welcome suggestions for particular developments to address specific fisheries management information needs.