This document describes the synthesis of commercial trawl fishing data for use in The Nature Conservancy's offshore component of the Pacific Northwest Ecoregional Assessment. Fishery-dependent, commercial trawling is only one of several types of commercial and recreational fishing occurring in this region that should be considered within an ecoregional assessment. However, it is the only type of fishing effort with spatial information that has been uniformly collected in log books. Other types of fishing, such as commercial longline or pot/trap are only tracked at the port where fish are landed, and therefore offer minimal information about the location of fishing activity.

For a complete ecosystem-based assessment it is necessary to include information about human uses of the marine environment in tandem with the biological and physical ecosystem components. NOTE: In using fisheries-related information in our ecoregional planning process we attempt to broaden our biodiversity conservation toolkit to include multiple management objectives, or ecosystem-based management (E-BM). To learn more about our E-BM approach visit http://www.marineebm.org/.