ScotMap - Inshore Fisheries Mapping Project in Scotland

ScotMap is a Marine Scotland project which provides spatial information on the fishing activity of Scottish-registered commercial fishing vessels under 15 m in overall length. The data was collected during face-to-face interviews with individual vessel owners and operators and relates to fishing activity for the period 2007 to 2011. The data is aggregated and analysed to provide information on the monetary value, relative importance (relative value) and the usage (number of fishing vessels and crew) of seas around Scotland.

The dataset, as of July 2013, is based on interviews of 1,090 fishermen. Not all fishermen initially targeted for the ScotMap project were interviewed (72% vessel coverage overall) and not all those interviewed provided earnings information (10% earnings disclosure decline rate overall). Individuals defined their fishing areas with variable levels of precision. Users of the data should be aware of this, particularly of the coverage provided by the ScotMap data set which varies regionally. See The Data Set and Interview Coverage and Feedback from Consultation sections of the final report for details.

Analyses based on data from all interviews and on sub-sets of the data, pertaining to the main fisheries identified by the study, are available to download as data files (*.tif; rasters), layer packages (*.lpk; ArcGIS v10.0 files with pre-loaded symbology; available only for national maps with all ScotMap interviews included) and ready-to-print maps (*.pdf).

For detailed information about the methodolgy, data analysis and data subsets please see the ScotMap Final Project Report.

The data is dividied by Monetary Value, Relative Value, Number of Vessels and Number of Crew.  The subsets are divided by gear. The data layers can be viewed on NMPi using the map links below or they can be downloaded from the data sources table instead. The GIS layers are available as Geotiff and PDF formats.