Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) pre-assessment report database

An MSC pre-assessment is an optional rapid high-level audit against the MSC Fisheries Standard. This data set contains 276 publicly available pre-assessments from the years 2009 to 2023. Each report has been broken down to the Unit of pre-assessment level for the species, gear and area targeted, client and assessor information, the associated MSC certified fisheries where relevant, and the scoring assessment to the relevant Performance Indicator level.

This data set does NOT include all the pre-assessments ever conducted. Pre-assessments conducted confidentially are not included. The reports were sourced from various websites across the internet but a large proportion came from Fishery Progress and are shared with permission from Fishery Progress. Further details for these pre-assessments can be found at https://fisheryprogress.org/. Pre-assessment reports that were shared confidentially with the MSC directly by the client fisheries, totalling 323 reports, are not included in this public dataset. All MSC certification scores are available for each certified fishery in their Public Certification Reports, which are publicly available at https://fisheries.msc.org/en/fisheries/.

The MSC aims to keep this dataset periodically updated as new pre-assessments are shared with the MSC and across the internet.

The downloadable documents contains an excel document with descriptions of the column headers, a png image of the database schematic, csv files of the individual tables and a csv file containing the url links to the publically accessible documents. A data paper describes the data uploaded here, see DOI linked below.

Disclaimer:

This data has been manually collated by MSC from pre-assessment reports prepared by third party assessors. MSC carries out data assurance to a standard that is fit for the purpose the information is used for, including being complete, accurate and as up to date as possible.  If accuracy is paramount to a finite resolution, receivers are asked to validate data against publicly available pre-assessment reports. The MSC is not responsible for any issues arising to any parties as a result of any information provided therein.