IPHC Statistical Areas
Pacific halibut are distributed throughout the continental shelf regions
of the Bering Sea and the northern Pacific Ocean, from northern California, through
Canadian waters, along the coast of Alaska, and into Russian territorial
waters. For management purposes, the IPHC divided the range into smaller
units known as statistical areas. These areas were used as convenient
analytical units for tabulating and analyzing halibut catch data, biological and
biometric data, and migration data from tagging experiments.
Traditionally, the statistical areas have only been used within the
offices of the Commission; however, with increasing data sharing, there
has been a growing interest in the definitions of the IPHC statistical
areas.
The statistical areas are being made available in the ESRI Geographic
Information System (GIS) shapefile format. Two sets of shapefiles
are available: the Pacific Ocean statistical areas (GOA_Den) and
the Bering Sea statistical areas (BS_Den). While the IPHC
statistical areas are defined as polygons in the Mercator projection,
the shapefiles contain a sufficient number of nodes to allow them to
closely approximate the IPHC statistical area polygons in any
projection.
