Kg of Blue Crab Trawl hour

Abundance data were obtained from the Gulf States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Southeast Area Monitoring and Assessment Program (SEAMAP), which conducts fishery-independent surveys in summer and fall for shrimp and groundfish. Theseabundance data were summarized from 40-foot trawls that sampled the Gulf from 1987 through 2009 and represent the offshore occurrence of blue crabs in the summer and fall, but do not include data from nearshore or estuarine waters. Theblue crab data provided from this sampling were standardized to kilograms of blue crabs captured per one-hour tow time. To provide a better view of the distribution of blue crab abundance, these data were interpolated from point samples to atwo-dimensional surface using ordinary kriging. This method provides a probabilistic estimation of unsampled locations using sample data to show a statistical representation of the area inclusive of all SEAMAP samples.The quality of these abundance data is good for U.S. offshore waters due to the extent of sampling by the SEAMAP project and consistent methodologiesused. Analogous data were not located for Mexico and Cuba. The quality of these data for nearshore and estuarine waters of all three countries is poor. While data for inshore and estuarine waters are available from fishery-independent monitoring programs or specific research projects in U.S. states, the lack of standardized sampling among states or projects limits the comparability of these data setsfor Gulf-wide use.