The ecological rankings are consistent with expectations: well managed fisheries, predominantly
in the US and Europe and some certified by groups such as Marine Stewardship Council
(MSC), rank near the top; open access developing country fisheries, along with prominent examples
of overfished industrial fisheries such as New England groundfish circa 2008, rank near
the bottom. Therefore, the discrete bin-based scoring system captures and aggregates variance
in the data consistent with more precise assessments of the same fisheries.