Global fish catches are falling three times faster than official UN figures suggest, according to a landmark new study, with overfishing to blame. 
 
 Seafood is the critical source of protein for more than 2.5 billion people, but over-exploitation is cutting the catch by more than 1m tonnes a year. 
 
 The official catch data, provided by nations to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), rarely includes small-scale, sport or illegal fishing and does not count fish discarded at sea. To provide a better estimate, more than 400 researchers around the world spent a decade finding other data to fill in the gaps. 
 
 The results, published in the journal Nature Communications, show the annual catches between 1950 and 2010 were much bigger than thought, but that the decline after the peak year of 1996 was much faster than official figures. 
 
 The FAO data indicated a catch of 86m tonnes in 1996, then a decline of 0.4m tonnes per year. In contrast, the new research estimates the peak catch was 130m tonnes, but declined at 1.2m tonnes per year afterwards. 
 
 “Our results differ very strongly from those of the FAO,” said Prof Daniel Pauly, at the University of British Columbia in Canada and who led the work. “Our results indicate that the decline is very strong and is not due to countries fishing less. It is due to countries having fished too much and having exhausted one fishery after another.” 
 
 Estimating subsistence, small-scale and illegal fishing is difficult, but Pauly said his team was confident in its results which - unlike the FAO data - includes estimates of the uncertainty. “This research is not based on a few studies here and there and then extrapolation,” he said. “It is based on the results of 200 studies we have conducted for about a decade by a network of 400 people in all countries of the world.” 
 
 The researchers used many different approaches to fill in the missing data, from hotel invoices for locally bought fish in the Bahamas to information on local fish consumption. 
 
 “This work has been carefully conducted by painstaking research into the hidden underbelly of global fishing, country by country, region by region” said Prof Boris Worm, at Dalhousie University in Canada and not involved in the new research. “This was a Herculean task that no one else has ever attempted. While the results necessarily remain uncertain, they undoubtedly represent our most complete picture yet of the global state of fish catches.” 
 
 Worm said the world’s fisheries were being over-exploited but that some stocks were being sustainably managed: “Where such measures have been taken, we find that both fish and fishermen are more likely to persist into the future.” 
 
 Global fish catches rose from the 1950s to 1996 as fishing fleets expanded and discovered new fish stocks to exploit. But after 1996, few undiscovered fisheries were left and catches started to decline. “It was never really sustainable,” said Pauly. The decline since 1996 has largely been in fish caught by industrial fleets and to a lesser extent a cut in the number of unwanted fish discarded at sea. 
 
 “The fact that we catch far more than we thought is, if you like, a more positive thing,” he said. “Because if we rebuild stocks, we can rebuild to more than we thought before.” 
 
 There has been success in some places where fishing has been restricted for a few years, for example in the Norwegian herring and cod fisheries. On resumption, catches were bigger than ever. 
 
 But Pauly said: “I expect a continued decline because I don’t expect countries to realise the need to rebuild stocks. I don’t see African countries, for example, rebuilding their stocks, or being allowed to by the foreign fleets that are working there, because the pressure to continue to fish is very strong. We know how to fix this problem but whether we do it or not depends on conditions that are difficult.” 
 
 A 2015 study showed nearly 500 Chinese fishing vessels operating off west Africa, with scores of cases of illegal fishing, according to Greenpeace. Large European vessels also operate in the region. In April 2015, the EU threatened Thailand with a trade ban over illegal fishing, while in September, Greenpeace said it had identified significant pirate fishing for tuna in the Pacific. 
 
 Prof Callum Roberts, at the University of York in the UK and not part of Pauly’s team, said: “This is a superb piece of research. Greater knowledge of what we have done and are still doing will help us to change for the better.” 
 
 “We can see more clearly now, for example, the immense value of fish to poor people in developing countries,” he said. “We can see how industrial fisheries from developing countries are robbing these people of livelihoods and food. We can also see, that in efforts to stem declines, we have been using more and more bycatch that was once thrown away.” ||||| Blue Marble If satellite images of Earth now seem almost routine, they never lose their ability to enthrall. This picture of the western hemisphere was captured on January 25 by NASA’s latest Earth observation satellite, Suomi NPP. By February 1, it had registered over 3 million views on Flickr – testament to the beauty and fascination of our Blue Marble. PHOTOS: Earth's Blue Marble Beauty 
 
 Pale Blue Dot In contrast to earlier suppositions about our place in the firmaments, we know now that our globe is not at the center of the cosmos, and that other celestial bodies are not attached to interlaced spheres that rotate around us. We are but one world among many, in one solar system among many, in one galaxy among many. In this image, taken by the Voyager I spacecraft from a distance of 4 billion miles, Earth is but a speck – a pale blue dot – in the cosmic night. 
 
 Moscow at night Time and technology have enabled us to explore, not just across the surface of the globe or even beneath its waves, but from on high. Here, Moscow is seen at night from the International Space Station, flying at an altitude of approximately 240 miles on March 28, 2012. A solar array panel for the space station is on the left side of the frame. The Aurora Borealis, airglow and daybreak frame the horizon. 
 
 South Pole For centuries, gaps in maps were filled by explorers who set out across land and sea, often at immense personal risk. The true nature of “Terra Australis” had long been established by the time Robert Falcon Scott and comrades stood at the South Pole on Jan. 17, 1912; but existing knowledge could not diminish the terrible toll the conditions exacted on the men. “Great God!” wrote Scott in his journal, “this is an awful place.” All five members of Scott’s polar team died before they could reach their base camp. PHOTOS: Forgotten Discoveries of Scott's Antarctica 
 
 Terra Australis Incognita In this copy of a 1602 map that was created on behalf of China’s Wanli emperor by Italian Matteo Ricci and collaborators, the familiar outlines of most of the world’s continents are coming into shape, although obviously many details remain unfinished. To the map’s makers, however, the likes of Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica are not even figments of the imagination, replaced instead by an enormous southern landmass. The notion of an unknown southern land – a terra australis incognita - was first mooted by Aristotle in 322 BCE; not until 1820 did Fabian von Bellingshausen become the first man to see the Antarctic continent. 
 
 Lenox Globe It is popularly believed that ancient cartographers filled in unknown and unexplored areas of the world with the phrase ‘Here be dragons’. In fact, only one known ancient map – the so-called Lenox Globe, which is believed to date to around 1510 - displays the phrase ‘HC SVNT DRACONES’, from the Latin “hic sunt dracones.” (The phrase is written near the equator on the eastern cost of Asia.) Some nineteenth-century writers, however, believed that it referred, not to dragons, but to the ‘Dagroians’, a people who “feasted upon the dead and picked their bones.” PHOTOS: Sea Monsters Real & Imagined 
 
 Flat Earth The Greek philosopher Aristotle determined that Earth was spherical and not flat almost 2,500 years ago. The notion of a flat earth retained at least a few die-hard devotees for a surprisingly long time. For example, this 1893 map by Orlando Ferguson, recently acquired by the Library of Congress, cites “Scripture that condemns the globe theory” and promotes a book that “knocks the globe theory clean out.” ANALYSIS: What if Earth Were a Cube? 
 
 Celestial Spheres In his 2nd century treatise, the "Almagest," Claudius Ptolemy proposed an explanation for the apparent movement of stars and planets, in which Earth was central and immovable, and surrounded by, at progressively greater distances, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and a sphere of ‘fixed stars.’ This geocentric view of the cosmos did not meet its first real challenge until Copernicus proposed that the planets revolved around the Sun, and Galileo used his telescope to observe the phases of Venus. 
 
 Babylonia Believed to be the earliest known representation of Earth, this stone tablet from Babylon shows the world as a disc, surrounded by a ring of water called the "Bitter River." The world is dominated by the area surrounding Babylon itself, and the Euphrates River bisects most of the inner circle. Unearthed in southern Iraq in the late 1800s, the tablet is housed in the British Museum. 
 
 Forty years ago this week, the crew of Apollo 16 captured this image of Earth rising above the lunar landscape. The Apollo missions enabled humanity to see for the first time our planet as it appears from space. As Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell once said: “When I was orbiting the moon and could put my thumb up to the window and completely cover the Earth, I felt a real sense of my own insignificance. Everything I'd ever known could be hidden behind my thumb.” As we approach Earth Day on April 22, we look at the efforts of people throughout the ages to explore, understand and portray our world and its place in the Universe. 
 
 Global fish catches are significantly higher than official reports, and declines in fish stocks are greater than have been previously estimated, according to a new study. 
 
 Writing in the journal Nature Communications, Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia conclude that the annual global fish catch is roughly 109 million metric tons, about 30 percent higher than the 77 million officially reported in 2010 by more than 200 countries and territories. This means that 32 million metric tons of fish goes unreported every year, “more than the weight of the entire population of the United States.” 
 
 These new figures show that overfishing worldwide is greater than had previously been thought, the authors say. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the global marine fish catch peaked in 1996 at 86 million metric tons, before declining slightly to its present level; the new study argues that the peak catch, in 1996, was in fact 130 million metric tons and has been declining, on average, by 1.2 million metric tons per year. 
 
 Earth Perspectives Through the Ages: Photos 
 
 “The world is withdrawing from a joint bank account of fish without knowing what has been withdrawn or the remaining balance,” Pauly said. 
 
 One of the reasons for the discrepancy in the catch figures, Pauly and Zeller say, is that official totals greatly underestimate the size of artisanal and subsistence fisheries worldwide. To their surprise, they found that these accounted for 25 percent of total catches; they slightly increased over the study period as more people participated. The bulk of the decline over the last 20 years, however, was due to decreases in industrial fisheries. 
 
 “Our results indicate that the declining is very strong and the declining is not due to countries fishing less,” Pauly said during a teleconference to announce the study. “It is due to the countries fishing too much and having exhausted one fish after the other.” 
 
 Oceans Valued at $24 Trillion: Here’s the Breakdown 
 
 The study arose from skepticism over the completeness of FAO figures, largely due to the fact that they rely on national governments reporting their own tallies, which for political or other reasons they might not always be disposed to do accurately. 
 
 Furthermore, when nations reported “no data,” that would “later be turned into a zero, which is a bad estimate of the catch of an existing fishery.” Over the course of a decade, Pauly, Zeller and their team scoured existing records dating back to 1950, delved into colonial archives, consulted with 400 researchers around the globe and even pored through receipts and invoices. 
 
 FAO has pushed back against the findings; in an email to Christopher Pala at Science Magazine, Marc Taconet, chief of FAO’s Fishery Statistics and Information Branch in Rome stated that, “we express reservations that the paper’s conclusions of declining catch trends can be strongly opposed to FAO’s reports of stable capture production trends in recent years.” 
 
 He did, however, “concur with the paper’s call upon countries’ responsibilities for improving reporting and for mobilizing funding resources.” 
 
 Some of the solutions Pauly and Zeller propose for improving the quality of records include better funding to enable FAO to support its member countries, and asking those countries to file separate figures for industrial and artisanal fisheries and to provide both documented and, when data are poor, estimated catches. 
 
 However, they note that while such moves would improve records, catches will continue to decline unless there are more widespread efforts to impose fishing caps and rebuild stocks. ||||| Catch reconstruction principles 
 
 The catch reconstruction approach rests on two basic principles16: 
 
 When ‘no data are available’ on a fishery that is known to exist, it is not appropriate to enter ‘NA’ or ‘no data’ into the database. Such entries will later be turned into a zero, which is a bad estimate of the catch of an existing fishery. This concern about the problematic ‘elegance of the number zero’ is also something that affects other scientific activities, such as climate modelling 43 ; 
 
 ; Rather, a best estimate should be inserted in all such cases, based on the fact that fishing is a social activity that is bound to throw a ‘shadow’ on the society in which it is embedded, and from which an approximate and conservative (but better than zero) estimate of catch can be derived if fishing of this type is known to occur (for example, from the seafood or the fuel consumed locally, or the number of vessels engaged in fisheries and the average catch rate of vessels of this type and so on). 
 
 This approach addresses an inherent negative bias in national and, by extension, global catch data, although considerable uncertainty in catch data is likely to remain. 
 
 Notably, when doing reconstructions, it became apparent that the perception of ‘no data’ being available was not always correct: the ‘social shadow’ yields hundreds of articles in the peer-reviewed and report literature with catch data, or data from which catch rates could be inferred, even for remote islands10. Also, countries may sometimes send to FAO a stripped down version of the national catch data their fisheries research institutes actually possess, and may even publish on their websites. 
 
 What is covered here are both ‘coastal’ waters, defined as the waters within the EEZ (Supplementary Fig. 1) that countries have claimed since this was allowed under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), or which they could claim under UNCLOS rules, but have not (such as many countries around the Mediterranean), and the open oceans, or High Seas, that is, the waters beyond national jurisdiction (that is, beyond the EEZs). The delineations provided by the Flanders’ Marine Institute (VLIZ, see www.vliz.be) are used for our definitions of EEZs. Countries that have not formally claimed an EEZ are assigned areas equivalent to EEZs based on the basic principles of EEZs as outlined in UNCLOS (that is, 200 nm and/or mid-line rules). Note that we (a) include territorial waters within our EEZs; and (b) treat disputed zones (that is, EEZ areas claimed by more than one country) as being ‘owned’ by each claimant with respect to their fisheries catches. We treat EEZ areas prior to each country’s year of EEZ declaration as ‘EEZ-equivalent waters’ (with open access to all fishing countries during that time). If the year of EEZ declaration could not be determined (and for ‘EEZs’ that were derived by us for non-claimant countries), we assign the year 1982 as declaration year, that is, the year of conclusion of UNCLOS. 
 
 We use different catch reconstruction approaches for EEZs (40% of the global ocean), and High Seas (60%), where the catches are mainly large pelagic fishes (notably tuna). Note that we also exclude the Caspian Sea from all considerations. 
 
 Domestic catch reconstruction method 
 
 Reconstructing time series of fisheries catch for all countries of the world from 1950 (the first year that FAO published its ‘Yearbook’ of global fisheries statistics) to 2010 was undertaken by fisheries ‘sectors’. However, because a standardized global definition of fishing sectors based on vessel size does not exist (for example, a vessel considered large-scale (industrial) in a developing country may be considered small-scale (artisanal) in developed countries), reconstructions utilize each country’s individual definitions for sectors, or a regional equivalent. These are described in each country reconstruction publication underlying this work. We consider four sectors: 
 
 Industrial: large-scale fisheries (using trawlers, purse-seiners, longliners) with high capital input into vessel construction, maintenance and operation, and which may move fishing gear across the seafloor or through the water column using engine power (for example, demersal and pelagic trawlers), irrespective of vessel size. This corresponds to the ‘commercial’ sectors of countries such as the USA; Artisanal: small-scale fisheries whose catch is predominantly sold (hence they are also ‘commercial fisheries’), and which often use a large variety of generally static or stationary (passive) gears. Our definition of artisanal fisheries relies also on adjacency: they are assumed to operate only in domestic waters (that is, in their country’s EEZ). Within their EEZ, they are further limited to a coastal area to a maximum of 50 km from the coast or to 200 m depth, whichever comes first. This area is defined as the Inshore Fishing Area (IFA)44. Note that the definition of an IFA assumes the existence of a small-scale fishery, and thus unpopulated islands, although they may have fisheries in their EEZ (which by our definition are industrial, whatever the gear used), have no IFA; Subsistence: small-scale non-commercial fisheries whose catch is predominantly consumed by the persons fishing it, and their families (this may also include the ‘take-home’ fraction of the catch of commercial fishers, which usually by-passes reporting systems); and Recreational: small-scale non-commercial fisheries whose major purpose is enjoyment. 
 
 In addition to the reconstructions by sector, we also assign catches to either ‘landings’ (that is, retained and landed catch) or ‘discards’ (that is, discarded catch), and label all catches as either ‘reported’ or ‘unreported’ with regards to national and FAO data. Thus, reconstructions present ‘catch’ as the sum of ‘landings’ plus ‘discards’. 
 
 Discarded fish and invertebrates are generally assumed to be dead, except for the US fisheries where the fraction of fish and invertebrates reported to survive is generally available on a per species basis45. Due to a distinct lack of global coverage of information, we do not account for so-called under-water discards, or net-mortality of fishing gears46. We also do not address mortality caused by ghost-fishing of abandoned or lost fishing gear47. 
 
 For commercially caught jellyfishes (particularly Rhizostomeae, but also other taxa), it has been shown that over 2.5 time more are caught than reported to FAO (mostly as ‘Rhizostoma spp.’)48. This factor is used to estimate missing catches of unidentified jellyfish. However, this additional catch is, pending further study, not allocated to any specific country or FAO area, and is thus counted only in the world’s total catch. 
 
 We exclude from consideration all catches of marine mammals, reptiles, corals, sponges and marine plants (the bulk of the plant material is not primarily used for human consumption, but for cosmetic or pharmaceutical use). In addition, we do not estimate catches made for the aquarium trade, which can be substantial in some areas in terms of number of individuals, but relatively small in overall tonnage, as most aquarium fish are small or juvenile specimens49. 
 
 Most catch reconstructions consist of six steps15: 
 
 (1) Identification, sourcing and comparison of baseline catch times series, that is, (a) FAO reported landings data by FAO statistical areas, taxon and year; and (b) national or regional data series by area, taxon and year. Implicit in this first step is that the spatial entity be identified and named that is to be reported on (for example, EEZ of Germany in the Baltic Sea), something that is not always obvious, and which poses problems to some of our external collaborators, notably those in countries with a claimed EEZ overlapping with that of their neighbour. 
 
 For most countries, the baseline data are the statistics reported by member countries to FAO. We treat all countries recognized in 2010 (or acting like independent countries with regards to fisheries) by the international community as having existed from 1950 to 2010. This is necessary, given our emphasis on ‘places’, that is, on time-series of catches taken from specific ecosystems. This also applies to islands and other territories, many of which were colonies, and which have changed status and borders since 1950. 
 
 For several countries, the baseline data are provided by international bodies. In the case of EU countries, the baseline data originate from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), which maintains fisheries statistics by smaller statistical areas, as required given the Common Fisheries Policy of the EU. A similar area is the Antarctic waters and surrounding islands, whose fisheries are managed by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), where catch data are available by relatively small statistical areas50. 
 
 When FAO data are used, care is taken to maintain their assignment to different FAO statistical areas for each country (Supplementary Fig. 1), as they often distinguish between strongly different ecosystems. For example, the Caribbean Sea versus the coast of the Eastern Central Pacific in the case of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala. For each maritime country, the area covered extends from the coastline to the edge of the EEZ, including any major coastal lagoons connected to the sea, and the mouths of rivers, that is, estuaries. However, freshwaters are excluded. 
 
 (2) Identification of sectors (for example, subsistence, recreational), time periods, species, gears and so on, not covered by (1), that is, missing data components. This is conducted via literature searches and consultations with local experts. This step is one where the contribution of local co-authors and experts is crucial. Potentially, all four sectors defined by us can occur in the marine fisheries of a given coastal country, with the distinction between large-scale and small-scale being the most important25. For any entity, we check whether catches originating from the four sectors were included in the reported baseline of catch data, notably by examining their taxonomic composition, and any metadata, which were particularly detailed in the early decades of the FAO ‘Yearbooks’51. 
 
 The absence of a taxon known to be caught in a country or territory from the baseline data (for example, cockles gleaned by women on the shore of an estuary)26 can also be used to identify a fishery that has been overlooked in the official data collection scheme, as can the absence of reef fishes in the coastal data of a Pacific Island state10. To avoid double counting, tuna and other large pelagic fishes, unless known to be caught by a local small-scale fishery (and thus in the past not likely reported to a Regional Fisheries Management Organization or RFMO), are not included in this reconstruction step (see below under ‘High Seas and other catches of large pelagic fishes’). 
 
 Finally, if gears are identified in national data, but a gear known to exist in a given country is not included, then it can be assumed that its catch has been missed, as documented for weirs (hadrah) in the Persian Gulf52. 
 
 (3) Sourcing of alternative information sources on missing sectors identified in (2), via literature searches (peer-reviewed and grey) and consultations with local experts. Information sources include social science studies (anthropology, economics and so on), reports, data sets and expert knowledge. The major initial source of information for catch reconstructions is governments’ websites and publications (specifically their Department of Fisheries or equivalent agency), both online and in hard copies. Contrary to what could be expected, it is often not the agency responsible for fisheries research and initial data collection that supplies the catch statistics to FAO, but other agencies, for example, statistical office or agency. As a result, much of the granularity of the original data (that is, catch by sector, by species or by gear) may be lost even before data are prepared for submission to FAO. Furthermore, the data request form sent by FAO each year to each country does not encourage improvements or changes in taxonomic composition, as the form that requests the most recent year’s data contains the country’s previous years’ data in the same composition as submitted in earlier years. This encourages the pooling of detailed data at the national level into the taxonomic categories inherited through earlier (often decades old) FAO reporting schemes, as was discovered, for example, for Bermuda in the early 2000s (ref. 53). Thus, by getting back to the original data, much of the original granularity can be regained during reconstructions. 
 
 Additional sources of information on national catches are international organizations such as FAO, ICES or SPC (Secretariat of the Pacific Community), or a Regional Fisheries Management Organization (RFMO) such as NAFO (Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization), or CCAMLR54, or current or past regional fisheries development and/or management projects (many of them launched and supported by FAO), such as the Bay of Bengal Large Marine Ecosystem project (BOBLME). All these organizations and projects issue reports and publications describing—sometimes in considerable details—the fisheries of their member countries. Another source of information is the academic literature, now widely accessible through Google Scholar. 
 
 A good source of information for the earlier decades (especially the 1950s and 1960s) for countries that were part of former colonial empires (especially British or French) are the colonial archives in London (British Colonial Office) and the ‘Archives Nationales d'Outre-Mer’, in Aix-en-Provence, and the publications of ORSTOM (Office de la recherche scientifique et technique d’outre-mer), for former French colonies. A further source of information and data are non-fisheries sources, including household and/or nutritional surveys, which are occasionally used for estimating unreported subsistence catches. Our global network of local collaborators is also crucial in this respect, as they have access to key data sets, publications and local knowledge not available elsewhere, often in languages other than English. 
 
 Supplementary Figure 2 shows a plot of the publications used for slightly over 110 reconstructions against their date of publication. Although, recent publications predominate, older publications firmly anchor the 1950s catch estimates of many reconstructions. On average, around 35 unique publications were used per reconstruction (not counting online sources and personal communications). 
 
 Potential language bias is taken seriously in the Sea Around Us, to ensure that data are collated in languages other than English. Besides team members who read Chinese, others speak Arabic, Danish, Filipino/Tagalog, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. To deal with other languages, research assistants are hired who speak, for example, Korean or Malay/Indonesian. We also rely on our multilingual network of colleagues and friends throughout the world, for example, for Greek or Thai. While it is true that English has now become the undisputed language of science55, other languages are used by billions of people, and assembling knowledge about the fisheries of the world is not possible without the capacity to explore the literature in languages other than English. 
 
 (4) Development of data ‘anchor points’ in time for each missing data item, and expansion of anchor point data to country-wide catch estimates. ‘Anchor’ points are catch estimates usually pertaining to a single year and sector, and often to an area not exactly matching the limits of the EEZ or IFA in question. Thus, an anchor point pertaining to a fraction of the coastline of a given country may need to be expanded to the country as a whole. For expansion, we use fisher or population density, or relative IFA or shelf area as raising factor, as appropriate given the local condition. In all cases, we consider that case studies underlying or providing the anchor point data may had a case-selection bias (for example, representing an exceptionally good area or community for study, compared with other areas in the same country), and thus use raising factors very conservatively. 
 
 (5) Interpolation for time periods between data anchor points, either linearly or assumption based for commercial fisheries, and generally via per capita (or per fisher) catch rates for non-commercial sectors. Fisheries are often difficult to govern, as they are social activities involving multiple actors. In particular, fishing effort is often difficult to reduce, at least in the short term. Thus, if anchor points are available for years separated by multi-year intervals, it usually will be more reasonable to assume that the underlying fishing activity continues in the intervening years with no data. We tread this ‘continuity’ assumption as a default proposition. Exceptions to such continuity assumptions are major environmental impacts such a hurricanes or tsunamis56, or major socio-political disturbances, such as military conflicts or civil wars57, which we explicitly consider with regards to the use of raising factors and the structure of time series estimates. In such cases, our reconstructions mark the event through a temporary change (for example, decline) in the catch time series, which is documented in the text of each catch reconstruction. At the very least, this provides pointers for future research on the relationship between fishery catches and natural catastrophes or conflicts. We note that the absence of such signals (such as a reduction in catch for a year or two) in the officially reported catch statistics for countries having experienced a major natural or socio-political disturbance can be a sign that their official catch data may not accurately reflect what occurs on the ground. This contributes to the emergence of ‘poor numbers’40. Overall, our reconstructions assume—when no information to the contrary is available—that commercial catches (that is, industrial and artisanal) can be linearly interpolated between anchor points, while non-commercial catches (that is, subsistence and recreational) can generally be interpolated between anchor points using non-linear trends in human population numbers or number of fishers over time (via per capita rates). 
 
 Radical and rapid effort reductions as a result of an intentional policy decision and implementation do not occur widely. One example we are aware of is the trawl ban of 1980 in Western Indonesia58. The ban had little or no impact on official Indonesian fisheries statistics for Western Indonesia, another indication that these statistics may have little to do with the realities on the ground. FAO hints at this being widespread in the Western Central Pacific and the Eastern Indian Ocean (the only FAO areas where reported catches appear to be increasing) when they note that ‘while some countries (i.e., the Russian Federation, India and Malaysia) have reported decreases in some years, marine catches submitted to FAO by Myanmar, Vietnam, Indonesia and China show continuous growth, i.e., in some cases resulting in an astonishing decadal increase (e.g., Myanmar up 121 percent, and Vietnam up 47 percent)’.42 
 
 (6) Estimation of total catch times series. A reconstruction is completed when the estimated catch time series derived through steps 2–5 are combined and harmonized with the reported catch of step 1. Generally, this results in an increase of the overall catch, but several cases exist where the reconstructed total catch is lower than the reported catch. The best documented case of this is that of mainland China14, whose over-reported catches for local waters in the Northwest Pacific are compensated for by under-reported catches taken by Chinese distant water fleets fishing elsewhere. In the 2000s, Chinese distant water fleets operated in the EEZs of over 90 countries, that is, in most parts of the world’s oceans5. Harmonizing reconstructed catches with the reported baselines goes hand-in-hand with documenting the entire reconstruction procedure. Thus, every reconstruction is documented and published, either in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, or as detailed technical reports in the publicly accessible and indexed Fisheries Centre Research Reports series or the Fisheries Centre Working Paper series, or other regional organization reports (Supplementary Table 5). 
 
 Several reconstructions were conducted in the mid- to late 2000s, when official reported data (that is, FAO statistics or national data) were not available to 2010 (refs 15, 59). All these cases are updated to 2010, in line with each country’s individual reconstruction approach to estimating missing catch data. Thus, all reconstructions are brought to 2010 to ensure identical time coverage (Supplementary Table 5). 
 
 Since these six points were originally proposed, a seventh point has come to the fore that cannot be ignored10: 
 
 (7) Quantifying the uncertainty associated with each reconstruction. In fisheries research, catch data are rarely associated with a measure of uncertainty, at least not in the form resembling confidence intervals. This may reflect the fact that the issue with catch data is not a lack of precision (that is, whether we could expect to produce similar results upon re-estimation), but about accuracy, that is, attempting to eliminate a systematic bias, a type of error which statistical theory does not really address. 
 
 We deal with this issue through a procedure related to ‘pedigrees’60 and the approach used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to quantify the uncertainty in its assessments61. The authors of the reconstructions are asked to attribute a ‘score’ expressing their evaluation of the quality of the time series data to each fisheries sector (industrial, artisanal and so on) for each of the three time periods (1950–1969, 1970–1989 and 1990–2010). These ‘scores’ are (1) ‘very low’, (2) ‘low’, (3) ‘high’ and (4) ‘very high’ (Table 1). There is a deliberate absence of an uninformative ‘medium’ score, to avoid the effective ‘non-choice’ that this option would represent. Each of these scores is assigned a percentage uncertainty range (Table 1). Thereafter, the overall mean weighted percentage uncertainty (over all countries and sectors) was computed (Fig. 1). 
 
 Table 1: Scoring system for deriving uncertainty bands for the quality of time series data of reconstructed catches. Full table Figures/tables index 
 
 Foreign catches 
 
 We define foreign catches as taken by vessels of a maritime state in the EEZ, or EEZ-equivalent waters of another coastal state. Based on our definition of sectors, all foreign fishing in the waters of another country is deemed to be industrial in nature. As the High Seas legally belong to no one (or to everyone), there can be no ‘foreign’ catches in the High Seas. Prior to UNCLOS, and the declaration of EEZs by maritime countries, foreign catches were illegal only if conducted without explicit permission within the territorial waters of such countries (generally 12 nautical miles). Since the declarations of EEZs by the overwhelming majority of maritime countries, foreign catches are considered illegal if conducted within the EEZ but without access being granted by the coastal state. A distinct exception is the EU, whose waters are managed by a ‘Common Fisheries Policy’, which implies a multilateral ‘access agreement’. 
 
 Access permission can be tacit and based on historic rights (‘observed’ access), or more commonly in the form of explicit access agreements and involving compensatory payment for the coastal state. The Sea Around Us, building on previous work by FAO62, has created a database of such access and agreements, which is used to allocate the catches of distant-water fleets to the waters where they were taken. 
 
 This information is then harmonized with the catches reported by FAO for countries fishing outside their country’s ‘home’ FAO areas, which always identifies this catch as distant-water industrial catch (see below for tuna catches reported to RFMOs). 
 
 In line with INTERPOL and others63, we define illegal fishing as foreign fishing within the EEZ waters of another country without a permission to access these resources. We do not treat domestic fisheries’ violations of ‘fishing regulations’ as ‘illegal’. In general, our reconstruction method cannot readily distinguish between legal and illegal foreign fishing, as we do not necessarily know about all access agreements5, 6. Thus, our data only pertain to ‘reported’ versus ‘unreported’ status, irrespective of legality of foreign fleets in a host country5. However, for around two dozen countries (mainly in West Africa) where the number of illegally operating vessels could be inferred, the fleet size can be multiplied by appropriate catch per unit of effort rates, leading to an estimate of illegal catch in these EEZs. 
 
 Industrial catches of large pelagic fishes 
 
 Nominal landings data. To date, there is no single, publicly available data set presenting industrial landings of tuna and large pelagic fishes for the entire world that is separate from the amalgamated FAO statistics, despite these fisheries being among the most valuable in the world64. Here, we first compile nominal industrial landings of tuna and other large pelagic fish caught either in the High Seas or within EEZs by fishing gear, taxon, countries and statistical reporting areas from data published by Regional Fisheries Management Organizations. Second, we use partially spatialized landings data provided by staff of the French ‘Institut de recherche pour le développement’ to spatially pre-assign the nominal landings data derived from RFMOs (Supplementary Table 6). 
 
 For each ocean, the nominal landings data are spatialized according to reported proportions in the previously spatialized data (Supplementary Table 6). For example, if the nominal data reports France catching 100 tonnes of yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares) in 1983 using longlines, but the spatial data only present 85 tonnes of yellowfin tuna reported in 1983 by France using longlines in four separate statistical cells, the nominal 100 tonnes for France are split into these four spatial cells according to their reported proportion of catch in the spatial dataset. This matching of the nominal and spatial records is done over a series of successive refinements, with the first being the best-case scenario, in which there are matching records for year, country, gear and taxon. The last refinement is the worst-case scenario, in which there are no matching records except for the year of catch. For example, if Sri Lanka reports 100 tonnes of yellowfin tuna caught in 1983 using longlines, but there are no spatial records for any country catching yellowfin tuna in 1983, the nominal 100 tonnes for Sri Lanka are split into spatial cells according to their reported proportions of total catch of any species and gear in 1983. The end result is a baseline landings database containing all matched and spatialized catch records, which sum to the original nominal catch tonnages. 
 
 Discards. A review of the literature for each ocean provided limited country- and fleet-specific discard data. Therefore, we average the discard rates across the entire time period and apply these to the region of origin of the fleet (for example, East Asia or Western Europe), rather than the actual country of origin of the fleet. Discards were spatialized in conjunction with nominal landings data. 
 
 Assembly of total catches 
 
 Ultimately, the total catch extracted from a given area, such as a given EEZ or EEZ-equivalent waters, or high seas waters within a given FAO area is computed as the sum of three data layers: (1) the reconstructed domestic catches within home EEZs (‘Layer 1’ data); (2) the derived catch by foreign fleets (‘Layer 2’ data); and (3) the tuna and other large pelagic fishes caught in the High Seas and in EEZs (‘Layer 3’ data). 
 
 Documentation of the catch reconstructions 
 
 The references and web-links of the contributions documenting the catch reconstructions that went into the re-estimation of the global catch of marine fisheries are documented in Supplementary Table 5. Altogether, 273 EEZs (or EEZ ‘components’) were covered in 247 catch reconstructions, which had 103 unique first authors and 279 unique co-authors in over 50 countries. 
 
 All data presented here are also deposited in the Dryad Digital Depository (DOI: 10.5061/dryad.4s4t1). 
 
 Analyses 
 
 To examine if significant breakpoints exist in the catch data time series of both reconstructed total catches and reported catches that may illustrate a change in trends of catches over time (that is, a change in the slope), we analyse the time series trajectories using segmented regression21. For both the reconstructed as well as reported time series, we identify two breakpoints, being 1967 and 1996, respectively (Supplementary Table 2). These breakpoints suggest a change in regression slope, with the second breakpoint suggesting a trend reversal. This was validated by testing for a significant difference-in-slope parameter using the Davies test65, which tests for a non-zero difference-in-slope of a segmented regression relationship. ||||| Commonly cited statistics have understated the size of the global seafood catch by about 30%, a new tally finds. The estimate, drawn in part from a painstaking effort to gather statistics on poorly documented subsistence, recreational, and illegal fisheries, suggests that the world catch has also declined more steeply since the 1990s than official figures indicate. 
 
 Overall, fishers caught an estimated 109 million metric tons (mt) of fish in 2010, researchers report today in Nature Communications. That’s well above the 77 million mt that nations reported to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, which keeps global catch statistics. 
 
 The reconstructed 2010 catch was 15% below peak landings of 130 million mt in 1996, estimate the researchers, who are based at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver in Canada. In contrast, FAO figures for the same 14-year period showed an 11% decline, from 86 million mt to 77 million mt. 
 
 The researchers also suggest that incomplete statistics have led FAO to make questionable pronouncements: Not long ago, they note, one of the agency’s reports described global catch levels as “practically stable.” The new figures challenge that idea, the researchers say. 
 
 FAO officials, however, are pushing back against the validity of the new numbers. “Comparing reconstructed catches with FAO statistics would be like comparing apples and oranges,” wrote Marc Taconet, chief of FAO’s Fishery Statistics and Information Branch in Rome, in an email. He added that based on “several sources of biases in the [study’s] method and the wide uncertainty ranges, we express reservations that the paper’s conclusions of declining catch trends can be strongly opposed to FAO’s reports of stable capture production trends in recent years.” 
 
 Many fisheries scientists have long been skeptical of the completeness of FAO’s statistics. The agency relies on national governments to estimate all of their catch except discards, and many nations don’t have the interest or capacity to tally landings from artisanal, subsistence, and recreational fisheries. And some nations have over- or underreported catches for political reasons, or ignored illegal landings, further complicating efforts to understand how fish stocks—a key source of protein—are faring. 
 
 To try to fill those gaps, researchers with the Sea Around Us project at UBC tapped into a worldwide network of colleagues. Over more than a decade, they attempted to reconstruct historic catches by scouring a range of sources, including academic papers, government websites, and reports gathering dust in local libraries and government archives. 
 
 The biggest surprise, says lead author Daniel Pauly of UBC, was the size of the artisanal and subsistence catches, primarily in the developing world: They amounted to 25% of the total. Overall, these catches slightly increased during the study period as more people participated, the researchers found. 
 
 These fisheries are also putting worrying pressure on many fish stocks, the study concluded. In small island countries sprinkled across the Pacific and the Caribbean, for instance, Pauly says, “the situation is much worse than anyone knew: the catches of local reef fish were crashing all over the place and the government officials didn’t know or care.” Pauly hopes the study “will get governments to focus more on their local fisheries.” 
 
 Shrinking industrial landings, however, were responsible for most of the recent global catch decline, the researchers concluded. Industrial landings, which make up about 75% of the global total, dropped by about 2% a year between the 1990s and 2010, they estimate. 
 
 Some eye-popping findings emerged from the examination of the industrial catch, the researchers say. West African nations, for instance, historically appear to have reported to FAO just 40% of the catches made by local vessels in near-shore waters, found UBC’s Dyhia Belhabib. And foreign vessels that lacked licenses to fish in those waters accounted for just over one-half of the offshore catch, she found. 
 
 Such findings highlight the need for nations, and FAO, to improve record keeping, the authors say. Better numbers, they add, will be essential to developing policies to protect a key food source. “Fish stocks are like bank accounts,” says co-author Dirk Zeller, senior scientist and executive director of Sea Around Us. “You need to know how much there is, and at what interest rate your money’s growing, so you can decide how much you want to take out.” 
 
 One step FAO could take, the authors say, is asking nations to report both documented and estimated catches. “Most countries use extensive estimation, approximation and raising procedures, especially in developing countries,” Zeller says. “Hence essentially all countries could estimate uncertainties around their reported data if they chose.” 
 
 “We concur with the paper’s call upon countries’ responsibilities for improving reporting and for mobilizing funding resources,” FAO’s Taconet said, adding that the agency “always welcomes research efforts. … This type of research is crucial for stimulating international discussion on unreported catches.” 
 
 What the reconstruction team has done “is monumental!” wrote Trevor Branch, a fisheries scientist at the University of Washington, Seattle, in an email. Although he doubts all of the numbers are accurate, he expects the data will improve over time as more specialists contribute to the database.
– Global overfishing might be much worse than previously thought, Discovery reports. A new study finds that UN figures have vastly understated the problem and that yearly fish hauls are declining three times faster than realized. According to the study, the UN—using numbers from the Food and Agriculture Organization—stated that global fishing peaked in 1996 at 86 million metric tons, but the researchers say it was actually closer to 130 million metric tons. Since then, the study claims the total amount of fish caught has declined by 1.2 million metric tons per year—not 0.4 million metric tons as the UN had said, the Guardian reports. “Our results indicate that the decline is very strong and is not due to countries fishing less," study author Daniel Pauly says. "It is due to countries having fished too much and having exhausted one fishery after another.” The study, which was published Tuesday in Nature Communications, is based on a decade of work by 400 researchers around the world. The numbers used by the UN come from the self-reporting of more than 200 countries and territories, and governments might not always be inclined to give accurate fishing counts, notes the Guardian. Researchers undertook a "Herculean task" to get more accurate counts for the years from 1950 to 2010, says one professor not involved with the study. “The world is withdrawing from a joint bank account of fish without knowing what has been withdrawn or the remaining balance,” Pauly tells Discovery. And while the Food and Agriculture Organization disputes the study's new numbers, it does agree with its conclusion that countries need to improve their reporting, according to Science. (One particularly devastating technique: bombing fish out of the water.)