Abstract

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has the mandate to collect fisheries statistics to feed the largest global database on fisheries statistics. FAO has been involved in the recent years in the design and develop-ment of innovative tools in support to the fisheries statistics supply chain.As part of its mandate to collate national statistics, FAO has been leading the development of standards for the definition of information to be collected, with the objective to address the need for sound statistics in support to evidence based policy making. Standard classifications such as the ASFIS list (list of species of interest for fisheries) are maintained and shared with different fisheries stakeholders; a new step is being taken now to define standard formats for the key fishery indicators that will facilitate data sharing and exchange from national through to regional and international level. The Coordinating Working Party on fishery statistics (CWP) is currently developing a global standard for data structure definitions which will constitute a global reference for publishing fishery datasets which can be easily exchanged. To support capacity building on these standard concepts, definitions and classifications, FAO has developed a number of technical guidelines and training materials including an International training course in fishery statistics and data collection (DeGraaf et al. 2014).

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