Get the general area that the information was taken from

Get the general area that the information (i.e., row of data) was taken from. Thankfully, PacFIN contains records from all areas, but unfortunately, we do not always want to use data from all of these areas in the stock assessment. Thus, this function helps to identify which data should be included based on standard filtering. We encourage users to continue to explore their data for records that may be outside of their jurisdiction for further filtering.

getArea(Pdata, verbose = TRUE)

Arguments

Pdata: A data frame of biological samples originating from the Pacific Fishieries Information Network (PacFIN) data warehouse, which originated in 2014. Data are pulled using sql calls, see PullBDS.PacFIN().
verbose: A logical specifying if output should be written to the screen or not. Good for testing and exploring your data but can be turned off when output indicates information that you already know. The printing of output to the screen does not affect any of the returned objects. The default is to always print to the screen, i.e., verbose = TRUE.

Value

A vector of characters with the same length as NROW(Pdata). Rows of data that should potentially be removed from your data are given a grouping like "Puget Sound" in an attempt to indicate where the record came from in a more transparent way than cryptic codes like 4a. NAs indicate records that the package maintainers believe should be maintained in your data set.

Rationale for excluded areas

Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW)

WDFW uses management regions, also known as Marine Fish-Shellfish Management and Catch Reporting Areas, to define the area in which landings occurred and sampled fish come from. These management regions are numeric and fall within the range of 1:99, though not all numeric values within this range are actually used. WDFW uses their management regions to define the PSMFC area in which landings occurred because PSMFC area is not a “recorded” value on fish tickets. See Table 3 on page 15 of Tsou et al. (2015) for a table that converts WDFW management region to PSMFC area.

A partial map of the WDFW management regions for the Puget Sound areas is provided in the Puget Sound Groundfish Management Plan (Palsson et al., 1998; see Figure 3 on page 26), and an arcgis layer of the management regions within the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Puget Sound was posted by SITC. Both of these resources were helpful in understanding how WDFW management regions 20-29 correspond to PSMFC area 4A and should be attributed to the Puget Sound. Where, 4A corresponds to everything east of Cape Flattery (i.e., the most easterly point of Washington state).

Foreign

Foreign samples, those coming from outside of the EEZ, could be in your data. The PacFIN documentation for areas identifies areas ZY or ZZ or 9[GMYZ] as those outside of the EEZ. Additionally, 3D and 3N make up VC, which is Canadian catches within the Vancouver area.