500 years of the once largest fishery in the world: A comprehensive catch reconstruction for the Newfoundland cod fishery (1508–2023)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2024, the Canadian government lifted the moratorium on fishing in what was once the world’s largest single-species fishery. Over the past thirty years, fisheries scientists and historians have debated the role of long-term exploitation in the fishery's collapse, but a lack of accurate historical catch data has hampered these discussions. This study introduces a groundbreaking reconstruction of historical cod catches in Newfoundland from 1508 to 2023. As the the longest, most comprehensive, and accurate reconstruction created to date, this dataset provides a crucial tool for unravelling the complex dynamics of the fishery's rise and fall. The data illuminate the historical trajectories of diverse national fishing fleets and maps the evolving spatial dimensions of the fishery. The dramatic decline of the fishery from centuries of relatively stable catches should prompt concern about the recent return to fishing, and historical data must play a role in informing the fishery's future. • From 1508–2023, cod catches in subareas 2–4 totalled more than 200 million t. • From 1508–2023, annual catches averaged 398,000 t over the entire fishery. • Catches exceeded 500,000 t per year between 1765 and 1790 and 1880–1990. • In a few extreme years in the 1960s landings peaked at over 1.4 million t. • The Newfoundland cod fishery was the largest in the world from the 1530s to the 1930s.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".