FIRMS Global Tuna Atlas

The FIRMS Global Tuna Atlas (GTA) builds on historical atlases focusing on one single ocean (Ardill 1995, Carocci and Majkowski 1996) and global experiences and initiatives such as the Atlas of Tuna and Billfish catches (Carocci et al. 2004), the Global Harmonized database for tuna fisheries (Nordtrom and Fonteneau 1996, Fonteneau 1997, 2009, 2010), and the BlueBridge Tuna Atlas (Taconet et al. 2016, 2017) which eventually, in 2019, converged into one coordinated initiative under governance responsibility of the Fisheries and Resources Monitoring System Partnership (FIRMS).

All currently available information is provided by the five tuna Regional Fishery Management Organizations:

• Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna ( CCSBT )

• Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission ( IATTC )

• International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas ( ICCAT )

• Indian Ocean Tuna Commission ( IOTC )

• Western & Central Pacific Fisheries Commission ( WCPFC ), in collaboration with the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC)

which, under the coordination of the FIRMS Secretariat, agreed to harmonize the submissions of their public datasets and update the GTA on an annual basis.

In its current version, the GTA disseminates catch data on tuna and tuna-like species. Two of the key products of the GTA are its metadata catalogue and the interactive map viewer, which presents the global distribution of catches in the period from 1950 to 2024 at various levels of spatio-temporal resolutions and for several species of temperate and tropical tuna (including oceanic principal market tuna species and more coastal/neritic species), billfish, tuna-like species such as bonitos and mackerels, and some bycatch species including several species of pelagic sharks. The Global Tuna Atlas includes 4 datasets:

• Global annual catches from tuna fisheries (1918-2024) (FIRMS level 0): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5745958

• Global monthly catches from tuna fisheries by 1° and 5° grids (1950-2024) (FIRMS level 0): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5747174

• Global monthly catches from tuna fisheries by 5° grid (1950-2024) (FIRMS level 0): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5746041

• Global monthly catches from tuna surface fisheries by 1° grid (1958-2024) (FIRMS level 0): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5745986

More information at https://www.fao.org/fishery/en/collection/firms-tuna-atlas