Database Document Series
The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) currently carries out the role of Data Manager and Custodian for the fisheries research data owned by the Ministry of Fisheries.
The Ministry of Fisheries data set incorporates historic research data, data collected more recently by MAF Fisheries prior to the split in 1995 of Policy to the Ministry of Fisheries and research to NIWA, and currently data collected by NIWA and other agencies for the Ministry of Fisheries.
This document is a brief introduction to rock lobster catch sampling and its associated data as held in the database rlcs, and is a part of the database documentation series produced by NIWA. It supercedes the previous documentation by Mackay (1992)1 and Mackay & Tyson (1998)2 on this database.
Catch sampling refers to the sampling of the catch from rock lobster fishing by observers, as opposed to the logbooks that the fishers themselves fill-in. The logbook sampling is documented in Walker & Mackay (2002)3.
Up to September 1992 this database was the MAF Fisheries catch sampling database csdb and included both the rock lobster catch sampling data and market sampling data for other species. At that date, in order to simplify matters, the market sampling data was moved to the market database. In 1994, csdb was renamed the rlcs database and now contains only data associated with rock lobster.
All documents in this series include an introduction to the database design, a description of the main data structures accompanied by an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD), and a listing of all the main tables. The ERD graphically shows the relationships between the tables in rlcs, and the relationships between these tables and other databases.
This document is intended as a guide for users and administrators of the rlcs database.
Access to this database and data is restricted to specific Nominated Personnel as specified in the current Schedule 6 of the Data Management contract between the Ministry of Fisheries and NIWA. Any requests for data should in the first instance be directed to the Ministry of Fisheries.
1 MACKAY, K. 1992: MAF Fisheries database documentation: 1: csdb. MAF Fisheries Internal Report No. 197. 22p.
2 MACKAY, K. & TYSON, P. J. 1998. Database documentation: rlcs. NIWA Internal Report No. 33. 45p.
3 WALKER, N. & MACKAY, K.A., 2002, Database documentation: rlcs. (B) Logbook schema. NIWA Internal Report. 22p.