SAUP (Sea Around Us Project)

The Sea Around Us is a research initiative, founded in 1999 at the University of British Columbia, that reconstructs and reports global marine fisheries catches by country, taxon, and FAO area. Its central contribution is catch reconstruction: by adding estimated illegal, unreported, discarded, and small-scale catch to official landings, it showed that real world catch peaked higher than FAO figures around the mid-1990s and has declined since, far steeper than reported. Its data, biomass, and value estimates are widely used in fisheries policy, the work led by Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller.