Reliable catch data are fundamental to fisheries assessment, ecosystem analysis, and evidence-based management. Over the past two decades, the Sea Around Us has reconstructed global marine fisheries catches to address gaps in official statistics and provide more comprehensive historical baselines for stock assessment, biodiversity conservation, and fisheries policy. These experiences demonstrate that catch reconstruction is not simply a data compilation exercise, but an essential step toward improving fisheries assessment and management.
Many of the challenges encountered in marine fisheries also exist in freshwater systems. In China, freshwater fisheries data are often fragmented across different administrative levels, reported using inconsistent formats and taxonomic classifications, and frequently fail to distinguish capture fisheries, stock enhancement, and aquaculture. These limitations constrain stock assessment, policy evaluation, and the assessment of major management measures such as the Yangtze River 10-year fishing ban.
This presentation proposes a collaborative framework for extending catch reconstruction from marine to freshwater fisheries. The framework combines the systematic compilation and harmonization of official fisheries statistics with complementary information from statistical yearbooks, technical reports, published literature, and other government records. Depending on data availability, reconstruction methods such as anchor points, interpolation, and demographic scaling can be applied to develop consistent long-term catch time series while documenting assumptions and uncertainties transparently.
The applicability of this framework is illustrated using an updated reconstruction of African inland fisheries, which extends catch estimates from 1950 to 2024. Preliminary results indicate that reconstructed catches exceed officially reported statistics by more than 50% in approximately three-quarters of African countries and territories, demonstrating the value of harmonized datasets for revealing hidden fisheries production and supporting more robust assessments. These experiences provide practical lessons for developing comparable freshwater fisheries datasets in China.
By linking lessons from marine catch reconstruction with emerging freshwater applications, this presentation highlights how harmonized historical catch datasets can provide the foundation for data-limited stock assessment, evaluation of fisheries policies, biodiversity conservation, and implementation of China's Blue Food agenda. It also outlines future directions for integrating marine and freshwater fisheries information into a more comprehensive aquatic food systems perspective.