Abstract

The Puerto Rico’s Commercial Fisheries Statistics Program (CFSP) collects the landings data by species, weight and price per pound since 1968. Since the beginning of the CFSP, has been necessary to estimate the under reported landings data. The Law 278 of November 28th, 1998, establishes that commercial fishers should report their catch to CFSP. Unfortunately, many fishers did not report their landings to the CFSP. The Puerto Rico’s Department of Natural and Environmental Resources (DNER) established on March 12th, 2004, the Regulation 6768, knows as Puerto Rico’s Fishery Regulations. The mentioned regulations include closed seasons, minimum legal sizes and gear limitations. The conservative measures produce that many commercial fishers were very angry with the DNER. The commercial fisher leaders ask to the fishers stop the submission of their landings data to the CFSP. Due to the mentioned fact, many fishers did not report the landings data. Although the CFSP have determined a correction factor every year since 1968, this paper described procedure to determinate the precise correction factor to obtain the under reported landings data for 2003-05. The correction factor was very useful with events of many fishers that no submitted data related to the Fishing Regulations 6768

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