Map of an FAO Major Fishing Area and Its Subareas

This function maps one FAO major marine fishing area with its subareas, divisions or subdivisions, labelled with their codes (e.g. 27.4, the North Sea), from the boundaries bundled with the package (inst/extdata/FAO_AREAS_CWP.shp, FAO, CC BY 4.0). When the ggOceanMaps package (Vihtakari 2026, https://github.com/MikkoVihtakari/ggOceanMaps) is installed, the map is drawn on its bathymetric base map: polar stereographic for areas reaching beyond 60 degrees of latitude (e.g. area 27), else in longitude and latitude, with the depth from the low-resolution ETOPO 2022 relief model bundled with ggOceanMaps (no download needed). Without ggOceanMaps, the land of Natural Earth is drawn in a Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection centred on the area, without depth.

Usage

fishing_area_map(
  area,
  level = c("subarea", "division", "subdivision", "none"),
  bathymetry = TRUE,
  labels = TRUE,
  engine = c("auto", "ggOceanMaps", "sf"),
  plot = TRUE,
  table = TRUE,
  lang = NULL,
  pptx = fao_setting("pptx"),
  plot_show = fao_setting("plot_show")
)

Arguments

area: The FAO major marine fishing area: its code (e.g. 27) or English name (e.g. "Atlantic, Northeast").
level: The units drawn inside the area: "subarea" (default), "division", "subdivision" or "none" (the outline of the area only). Areas without units at the level asked for are drawn with their outline only.
bathymetry: A logical value. If TRUE (default), the depth is shown (ggOceanMaps only).
labels: A logical value. If TRUE (default), the units are labelled with their codes.
engine: How the map is drawn: "auto" (default, ggOceanMaps when installed, else "sf"), "ggOceanMaps" or "sf".
plot: A logical value. If TRUE (default), the map is saved in figures/png/area/.
table: A logical value. If TRUE (default), the table of units is saved in tables/.
lang: The language of the map text and names: "en" (English), "zh" (Chinese) or "both" (Chinese and English). Default is NULL, which uses the language set with fao_settings() ("en" unless changed).
pptx: A logical value. If TRUE, the map is also saved as an editable PowerPoint file in figures/pptx/area/. Default is the value set with fao_settings() (FALSE unless changed).
plot_show: A logical value. If TRUE, each chart is also drawn in the plot window (e.g. the Plots pane of RStudio) as it is saved, to look at it at once. Default is FALSE, which can be changed for all functions with fao_settings(plot_show = TRUE). The charts are saved as files (plot = TRUE) either way.

Value

Invisibly, a list with map (the ggplot object), units (one row per unit: code, level, name_en), engine, fao_map (link to the official FAO map of the area) and sources (the boundaries, base map and depth data used, to cite with the map).

Details

The official FAO map of the area is linked in the result (fao_map); see fao_areas().

References

FAO (2024). FAO Major Fishing Areas for Statistical Purposes. In: FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Division [online]. Licence: CC-BY 4.0. https://www.fao.org/fishery/geonetwork?uuid=ac02a460-da52-11dc-9d70-0017f293bd28

NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (2022). ETOPO 2022 15 Arc-Second Global Relief Model. doi:10.25921/fd45-gt74

Vihtakari, M. (2026). ggOceanMaps: Plot Data on Oceanographic Maps using 'ggplot2'. R package version 3.0.0. doi:10.32614/CRAN.package.ggOceanMaps, https://github.com/MikkoVihtakari/ggOceanMaps

Examples