For decades, fisheries statistics told us how much was caught — but not precisely where. The UK’s new LEAPFISH release changes that. Published by the Marine Management Organisation (MMO) on 7 October 2026, it maps 2024 fishing activity by UK and Crown Dependency vessels of 12 metres and over onto tiny 0.05-degree grid cells, revealing patterns that the old, much larger statistical rectangles simply hid. The headline finding is striking: a fleet that spent 2.52 million hours at sea landed 694,059 tonnes worth £981.7 million — and most of that value came from a surprisingly small patch of sea.
This is not a funding call or a job advertisement, so there is no application deadline to miss. It is a public statistics release — and for students, researchers, fisheries managers and anyone who follows marine policy, it is one of the most useful datasets the UK has published this year. Below is what the numbers actually say, how the method works, where its limits lie, and how you can use the data yourself.
At a Glance: LEAPFISH 2024
| Detail | What LEAPFISH 2024 Shows |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Marine Management Organisation (MMO), on behalf of the UK Fishing Authorities |
| Published | 7 October 2026, as Official Statistics in Development |
| Coverage | UK and Crown Dependency commercial vessels 12 metres and over, all waters, calendar year 2024 |
| Method | Landings data linked to Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) positions, mapped to 0.05-degree c-squares |
| Time at sea | 2,522,089 hours (estimated) |
| Fishing effort | 1,645,161 hours — 65.2% of time at sea |
| Live weight | 694,059 tonnes |
| Landed value | £981.7 million |
| Application deadline | None — this is a published dataset, not a call for applications |
What Is LEAPFISH?
LEAPFISH stands for Landings Enriched Approach to Positional FISHeries data. In plain language, it takes two existing data streams and joins them together. The first is landings data — species, weight and first-sale value recorded through logbooks, landings declarations and sales notes. The second is VMS data — automatic position reports that UK vessels of 12 metres and over must transmit at least every two hours, each recording location, speed, course and timestamp.
By classifying VMS positions as fishing or non-fishing and sharing each trip’s landings across its matched fishing positions in proportion to fishing time, the MMO can allocate weight and value to the patch of sea where the fishing probably happened, rather than to the whole statistical rectangle where the catch was merely reported. The result is published as a downloadable dataset and four spatial layers covering live weight, landed value, time spent at sea and fishing effort, grouped by 0.05 c-square and gear group, with the matching ICES rectangle also identified.
The improvement in resolution is dramatic. A traditional ICES statistical rectangle typically covers around 3,000 to 4,000 square kilometres. A 0.05-degree c-square generally covers around 15 to 20 square kilometres — and each ICES rectangle contains 200 c-squares. That 200-fold finer grid is the whole point: fishing is concentrated, and coarse rectangles smear that concentration away.
The Headline Numbers — And How They Check Out
LEAPFISH covers 99.8% of total UK 12m+ live weight and 99.7% of total landed value, so it is not a sample — it is very nearly the whole 12m+ fleet. Its totals sit reassuringly close to the established UK Sea Fisheries Statistics 2024 (SFS24) figures for the same fleet: 695,770 tonnes and £984.3 million. The small gaps (1,711 tonnes and £2.6 million) reflect the linking and allocation process, not a different fishery. For context, the 12m+ landings in LEAPFISH represent 93.2% of the live weight and 84.7% of the landed value reported for all UK vessels in SFS24 — the under-12m fleet, which is not in LEAPFISH, accounts for a larger share of value than of weight, as small boats often target higher-value species.
Across the whole UK fleet in 2024, UK vessels landed 745 thousand tonnes of sea fish worth £1.16 billion, according to the MMO’s SFS24 announcement — up 4% in quantity and 5% in value on 2023. LEAPFISH zooms into the 12m+ slice of that total and shows where it was earned.
The Great Effort Paradox: Pelagic vs Demersal Trawls
The single most counter-intuitive finding concerns effort versus reward. Pelagic trawling — towing a net through the water column for species such as mackerel and herring — accounted for just 0.9% of total fishing effort (around 14,000 hours) yet produced 67.7% of live weight (around 470,000 tonnes) and £445.4 million of landed value. Demersal trawling — towing a net on or near the seabed — showed almost the opposite pattern: 56.1% of fishing effort (around 923,000 hours) for only 18.9% of live weight (131,000 tonnes) and £311.6 million of value.
| Gear group | Share of fishing effort | Live weight | Landed value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pelagic trawls | 0.9% (~14,000 hours) | 67.7% (~470,000 tonnes) | £445.4 million |
| Demersal trawls | 56.1% (~923,000 hours) | 18.9% (131,000 tonnes) | £311.6 million |
| Beam trawls | 11.1% (~183,000 hours) | 1.7% (11,600 tonnes) | £50.4 million |
Beam trawling also worked harder than its catch suggests: 11.1% of effort for 1.7% of weight and 5.1% of value. Together, four gear groups — demersal trawls, dredges, beam trawls and pots and traps — accounted for 91% of total fishing effort (1.49 million hours) and £470.8 million, or 48.0%, of landed value. The lesson for students and managers is blunt: hours at sea are a poor proxy for catch. What matters is gear, target species and ground — and LEAPFISH is the first UK release to show all three together at this scale.
Most Fishing Stayed Inside UK Waters — But Not Evenly
Fishing activity within UK waters accounted for 78.5% of live weight (around 545,000 tonnes), 84.9% of landed value (£833.8 million) and 85.7% of fishing effort (around 1.41 million hours). Within those waters, activity clustered hard. The MMO identifies hotspots of live weight and value around northern and north-eastern Scotland, while landed value was more prominent than live weight in parts of the western English Channel — a sign of higher-value species rather than bigger catches. The central English Channel, by contrast, showed comparatively limited activity on all four measures, which the MMO suggests may reflect productive grounds, operating costs, restrictions and competing uses such as shipping.
Concentration varies sharply by gear. Demersal trawling had the greatest spatial extent — landed value spread across 24,776 c-squares — but was the least concentrated of the four main gears, with half its value spread across 2,806 c-squares (11.3% of its extent). Dredging was the opposite: the most concentrated gear, with half its landed value coming from just 5.9% of the c-squares where dredging occurred, focused around the eastern and western English Channel and the Isle of Man, where king scallops accounted for more than 90% of dredge landed value in those areas. Beam trawling was the second most concentrated, focused on south-west England and the western English Channel, where it supplied 46.9% of beam-trawl landed value against 29.4% of live weight — a gap the MMO partly attributes to high-value sole, turbot and brill.
The 31F1 Example: Why Fine Resolution Changes Decisions
The MMO’s worked example, ICES rectangle 31F1 off the eastern coast of Kent, shows why this matters beyond academic interest. The rectangle includes busy shipping routes between England and France. LEAPFISH allocated £6.3 million of landed value to 31F1 in 2024 — but that value sat in only 84 of the rectangle’s 200 c-squares, and just 10 c-squares (5% of the rectangle) accounted for half of it. For demersal trawling alone, £1.55 million was spread across 42 c-squares, with half concentrated in just six c-squares (3% of the rectangle). Nor is 31F1 unusual: in rectangle 48E6 north of Orkney, just six of 190 c-squares accounted for half of its £18.4 million.
The boundary implication is even sharper. The UK 6 to 12 nautical mile zone covers 21.5% of the sea area within 31F1. If demersal-trawl value were assumed to be spread evenly, about £334,000 of the £1.55 million would fall inside that zone. LEAPFISH’s finer analysis instead puts £897,000 — 57.7% — inside it. Any decision drawn on the even-spread assumption, from marine planning to offshore wind siting to Marine Protected Area boundaries, would have understated the inshore value by more than half. That is precisely why the MMO built LEAPFISH: spatial data are now used as key evidence for Marine Protected Areas and for assessing offshore wind proposals, and coarse data can mislead both.
How to Use the LEAPFISH Dataset Yourself
- Start from the official summary, not a news rewrite. Read the MMO’s LEAPFISH 2024 statistical summary (linked below) for the definitions — live weight, landed value, time at sea and fishing effort are not interchangeable, and the summary explains each.
- Download the dataset and layers. The release provides an OpenDocument Spreadsheet dataset plus four spatial layers. Filter by gear group and c-square to reproduce any figure in this post before citing it.
- Compare gears, not just totals. Put effort beside weight and value for the same gear, as in the table above — that comparison is where the real story lives.
- Test a boundary question. Pick a rectangle, a 6–12 nautical mile zone or a proposed wind area, and compare the even-spread assumption against the c-square allocation, as the MMO does for 31F1.
- Respect the caveats. Treat every c-square value as an estimate, check the methodology statement, and never present a LEAPFISH cell as the proven location of a single haul.
Read the Caveats Before You Cite It
LEAPFISH is an estimation methodology, and the MMO says so plainly. Fishing activity is estimated from VMS positions classified as fishing using speed, location and reported activity — but fishing can occur above the modelled speed threshold, while drifting, waiting or sheltering at low speed can be misclassified as fishing. VMS positions arrive at least every two hours, so shorter operations between pings may be missed. Landings are shared across matched positions in proportion to fishing time, although real catches may be concentrated in particular hauls. Fishing effort can be counted where no landings are allocated, and for static gears, vessel time does not capture how much gear was deployed or how long it stayed in the water. None of this makes the release unreliable — its totals reconcile closely with SFS24 — but it does mean c-square figures are modelled estimates, not a GPS track of every net.
There is also a timely context readers should not confuse with LEAPFISH itself. On 27 October 2026, the MMO requested cancellation of the Accredited Official Statistics designation for its UK Sea Fisheries Statistics publications, following discussions with the Office for Statistics Regulation, while improvements are made to statistical processes, methodology and data quality, and it intends to seek reaccreditation once that work is complete. LEAPFISH, by contrast, was published from the start as Official Statistics in Development — a status that means methods are still being refined and user feedback is invited. The cancellation concerns the older SFS series’ accreditation; it is not a retraction of LEAPFISH, and the two statuses should not be conflated.
Why This Matters Beyond the UK
India, the EU and other fishing nations face the same problem LEAPFISH tackles: catch statistics reported by large area hide where pressure on the seabed, on stocks and on other sea users actually falls. The EU’s own catches fell to an estimated 3.3 million tonnes in 2025, as Fisheries India reported from Eurostat’s October 2026 update, and global output reached 235 million tonnes in FAO’s SOFIA 2026. Stock-by-stock advice, such as ICES advice for 2027, sets how much may be caught; LEAPFISH-style spatial data show where that catch will actually be taken. And where national assessments use spatial evidence — Australia’s 2025 stock status, where 65 of 107 stocks passed both health tests — finer geography makes the assessment harder to game and easier to audit. For Indian readers, the transferable lesson is methodological: link landings to vessel tracks, publish at fine resolution, and state the uncertainty honestly.
FAQs
Is LEAPFISH a map I can use for navigation? No. The MMO states its maps are not to be used for navigation; they are statistical estimates of fishing activity.
Does LEAPFISH cover small boats? No. It covers UK and Crown Dependency vessels 12 metres and over only, including vessels registered in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, plus Jersey, Guernsey and Isle of Man vessels where applicable.
Is there a deadline to apply for anything here? No. LEAPFISH is a published dataset. The only dates that matter are the release date (7 October 2026) and the reference year (2024).
Where can I check these figures? In the official sources below — the MMO statistical summary is the primary source for every number in this post, and the GOV.UK notice is the source for the accreditation update.
Official Sources
- MMO, LEAPFISH 2024 Statistical Summary (published 7 October 2026) — official PDF
- GOV.UK, LEAPFISH 2024 publication announcement (release date confirmed 7 October 2026) — GOV.UK announcement
- GOV.UK, Cancellation of Accredited Official Statistics designation for UK Sea Fisheries Statistics (MMO request, 27 October 2026) — GOV.UK notice
- GOV.UK, Fishing industry 2024 statistics published (UK Sea Fisheries Statistics 2024: 745 thousand tonnes, £1.16 billion) — GOV.UK news
Note: the banner and portrait images on this post are illustrations created for Fisheries India; all statistics quoted are from the official MMO and GOV.UK sources above, verified on 28 October 2026.