These data are a gridded data product delineating annual estimated fishing
effort from vessel data available Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) only as well
as joined VMS and Automatic Identification System (AIS) data interpolated to
have vessel positional data for every 20 minutes for vessels active in the UK
Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) separately generated for eight gear groups.
Although the data mainly contains information on vessels with length above
12m, fishing effort of some parts of the inshore fleet and international
vessels are included where data were available. Grid cells in which 3 or less
vessels were fishing are suppressed to acknowledge commercial sensitivity of
the information.
