This dataset provides the Normalized distance traveled by the french fishing vessels targeting tuna and tuna-like species in the Atlantic and Indian oceans from 2000 to 2017. The ndistance is normalized and stratified by fishing gear, vessel flag reporting country, time (regular intervals of 1 month) and area (statistical squares of 5° longitude and latitude). These data come from the Virtual Monitoring System (VMS) database.

These data were collected by the Observatory of Exploited Tropical Pelagic Ecosystems (Ob7) of the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD). The source fine-grained data (i.e. precise location and date) were first extracted from the database and then aggregated on a 1 month timeframe and 5° longitude and latitude resolution grid to produce this dataset. Additional details are provided in the « supplemental information » and in the « lineage » sections.