Foreign and domestic commercial fisheries data from three separate sources were used to describe the trawling effort and total catch in the North West Shelf of Australia between 1973 and 1997. These are Taiwanese Logbook data (Anon. 1973-1982), foreign (Taiwanese, Chinese and South Korean) trawl data collated by the Australian Fisheries Management Authority (1979-1989), and domestic catch and effort statistics data collated by Fisheries, Western Australia (1979-1997). Trawling effort and total catch by year are presented in time series plots and in thematic maps describing their spatial distribution over part of the NWS region on a 10 by 10 minute grid scale. Furthermore the data was divided into 22 species categories (mostly family level classifications) and presented as separate time series of the catches for each of these. Yearly distribution maps of the proportion of each species category over the total catch within each 10 by 10 minute grid are also presented. In addition is the reconstruction and description of what is regarded as the most reasonable and likely record of the historical catch and effort for the commercial fisheries operating on the North West Shelf, by the authors. These interpretations were based mainly on the data sets reviewed here, but also included additional information obtained directly from Taiwan during projects in the mid 1990s. Reconstruction of some historical catches is at a finer taxonomic resolution than is provided in the original data. This reconstruction of the historical catch, and effort data for the fishery, was used in the North West Shelf Joint Environmental Management Study (NWSJEMS) Project 5 to model fish populations and evaluate fishery management strategies.
