This project was co-ordinated by Dr Angel Guerra at Instituto de Investigaciones Marinas in Vigo.
The aim of this study is to develop a software for estimation of unreported or misreported catch and effort data using the approach developed by Gomez Muñoz (1990), and successfully applied to a small-scale squid hand-jig fishery of the NW Iberian peninsula (Simon et al, 1996). The target species of this study were hake, megrim, monkfish and commercially exploited cephalopod species (long-finned squid, short-finned squid, cuttlefish and common octopus) mainly from areas VI, VII and VIII of ICES but also from some divisions of the areas IV and V where the Scottish fleet operates.
A total of 82 fishing ports along the Galician coast (NW Spain) and 25 ports in Scotland were studied from January 1998 to December 1999. The software developed ("Celta") has the following functions (a) entry of fleet data for each port and interview data, (b) Categorization of the ports and selection of model ports, (3) estimationm of total catches by species, fishing ground and gear for the model ports, (4) estimation of total catches for the remaining ports, (5) estimation of CPUE for each gear, fishing ground and species in each model port, (6) estimation of CPUE for the remaining fishing ports. Accuracy of the catches obtained from interviews processed by the software was assessed by comparison with direct catch data.
