Reconstruction of North Sea trawling effort 1985-2015

Spatial distribution of total international otter and beam trawling fishing effort, for all ICES rectangles (0.5 degree latitude by 1 degree longitude) of the North Sea, covering a 31-year time span from 1985 to 2015. The dataset was largely reconstructed using compiled effort data from 7 fishing effort time-series and completed by estimations of missing data. Lat and Long coordinates in the data represent the centre of each ICES rectangle.