Africa Inland Fisheries Data

This dataset contains the data and reproducibility materials supporting the manuscript, “The Future of Africa’s Inland Fisheries: Drivers, Pressures, and Pathways to Sustainability.”The files include FAO FishStat production data for African inland capture fisheries and inland aquaculture, covering 1950 to 2023. The data support analyses of continental, regional, country-level and taxonomic production patterns, including trends in capture fisheries, aquaculture growth, species composition and the reliability of reported production statistics. The dataset also contains the broader African capture-production records used for comparative analysis.A separate dataset presents annual changes in the permanent water area of Lake Chad from 1984 to 2021. The accompanying R scripts contain the data-processing and figure-generation workflows used to produce the manuscript’s figures and derived statistics.The principal files are:Africa_inland_aquaculture_production.csv: African inland aquaculture production records.Africa_inland_capture_production.csv: African inland capture fisheries production records.Africa_capture_production.csv: Broader African capture fisheries production data used for comparison.LakeChad_WaterArea_PermanentOnly_1984_2021.csv: Annual estimates of permanent water area in Lake Chad.R scripts: Code used to process the data, conduct the analyses and reproduce the manuscript figures.Production values are reported primarily as tonnes of live weight. FishStat records include country or reporting entity, year, production source, aquatic environment, species or taxonomic group, and reliability flags where available. Users should note that some FAO records are imputed or reported under aggregated “Not Elsewhere Included” categories. These limitations are examined explicitly in the accompanying manuscript.The data are provided to promote transparency, reproducibility and further research on the status, pressures and sustainable management of Africa’s inland fisheries.