fishstat-package: Global Fishery and Aquaculture Statistics

Description

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) FishStat database is the leading source of global fishery and aquaculture statistics and provides unique information for sector analysis and monitoring.

This package provides the global production data from all fisheries and aquaculture in R format, ready for analysis.

Arguments

Joining Tables

Production tables can be joined with lookup tables using the merge function, as demonstrated in the help page examples for aquaculture and capture production. The column names in this package have been designed to allow automatic inference of which columns to join, and the resulting table will have unique column names.

The merge function is generally useful for joining tables, but other join methods are available in R that can be faster but require either additional packages or more coding. The production example uses square brackets and the match function to add one lookup column at a time to the production table. Compared to the slower merge function, this saves time, both for users and CRAN servers running maintenance tests.

Rather than optimizing speed or memory footprint, one can optimize convenience by constructing a full table with all data records and all columns:


prod.all <- merge(merge(merge(merge(merge(merge(production,
                  area), country), measure), source), species), status)
cap.all <- merge(merge(merge(merge(merge(capture,
                 area), country), measure), species), status)
aqua.all <- merge(merge(merge(merge(merge(merge(aquaculture,
                  area), country), environment), measure), species), status)

Popular paradigms for joining tables include:

Base R, where merge returns a data.frame.
The dplyr package, where inner_join returns a tibble.
The data.table package, where merge returns a data.table.

Author

Arni Magnusson and Rishi Sharma created this R package.

All credit for the FishStat database goes to the Statistics Team of the FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Division, as well as national data submitters. The database terms of use are based on the CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO license. The R package is released under a similar CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

To cite the use of FishStat data:

FAO. [Year]. FishStat data. Fisheries and Aquaculture Division. Rome. https://www.fao.org/fishery/en/fishstat.

To cite the use of this R package to access the data, cite FishStat (above) as well as:

Magnusson, A. and R. Sharma. [Year]. fishstat: Global Fishery and Aquaculture Statistics. R package version [Version]. https://cran.r-project.org/package=fishstat.

Details

Production tables:

`aquaculture`	aquaculture production
`capture`	capture production
`production`	aquaculture and capture production

Lookup tables:

`area`	fishing areas
`country`	countries and territories
`environment`	aquaculture environments
`measure`	units of measurement
`source`	sources of production
`species`	taxonomic groups
`status`	status of data entries

Examples

Run this code

head(production)

# Analyze production measured in tonnes
prod <- production[production$measure == "Q_tlw" & production$value > 0,]

# Fast merge yearbook and inlandmarine columns
prod$yearbook <- species$yearbook[match(prod$species, species$species)]
prod$inlandmarine <- area$inlandmarine[match(prod$area, area$area)]

# Select SOFIA species, excluding mammals, reptiles, and plants
prod <- prod[grep("Fish, crustaceans and molluscs", prod$yearbook, fixed=TRUE),]

# Determine origin
prod$origin <- ifelse(prod$source == "CAPTURE", "Capture", "Aquaculture")
prod$w <- ifelse(prod$inlandmarine == "Marine areas", "marine", "inland")
prod$origin <- paste0(prod$origin, " (", prod$w, ")")
cbind(sort(unique(prod$origin)))

# World capture fisheries and aquaculture production
x <- xtabs(value~year+origin, aggregate(value~year+origin, prod, sum))
x <- x[,c(2,1,4,3)] / 1e6
library(areaplot)
areaplot(x, legend=TRUE, args.legend=list(x="topleft"), ylab="million tonnes")

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