Poland, not Germany, has the best-documented fishery in our data

Our first post on this dataset picked out two countries as bookends: Germany, where one in eight mapped fishing spots is notable enough to have its own documentation, and Canada, which has more mapped water than anywhere else on earth and almost none of it individually written up. That comparison used four countries, and four countries isn't a ranking, it's an anecdote. So I went back and ran it properly, across every country with enough mapped spots for the comparison to mean something.

Germany is not the top of that list. It's fourth. I was a little surprised too.

What "documented" means here

For every country in the WikiCatch dataset, we can compute two numbers: total mapped fishing spots, and how many of those are "notable," meaning they've cleared a documentation threshold (a linked reference or sustained in-app ratings). Divide one by the other and you get a rough proxy for how thoroughly a country's fishing water has been written about, independent of how much water it has.

Across the whole dataset, 9,902 of 325,549 spots are notable: a global rate of 3.04%. But most countries don't have enough mapped spots for that ratio to be meaningful. We restricted the comparison to the 37 countries with at least 1,000 mapped spots; the other 157 have too small a sample to rank fairly (a country with 40 spots and 4 notable ones "documents" at 10%, but that's noise, not a finding).

The top of the list

Rank	Country	Mapped spots	Notable	Documented share
1	Poland	1,723	485	28.1%
2	Italy	1,652	275	16.6%
3	United Kingdom	2,511	335	13.3%
4	Germany	7,253	910	12.5%
5	Chile	2,685	265	9.9%
6	Spain	2,959	283	9.6%
7	Finland	4,393	379	8.6%
8	Peru	2,959	239	8.1%
9	Netherlands	1,170	90	7.7%
10	Austria	2,141	155	7.2%

Poland's rate is over nine times the global average, which sounds like a headline until you look at the sample size sitting next to it. Poland's whole mapped fishery is 1,723 spots, smaller than Germany's notable count alone. Germany is the one entry in this top ten operating at real scale: 7,253 spots, 910 of them documented, a base four times the size of the next-largest country on the list. A small, thoroughly written-up fishery and a large one can both post an impressive percentage. I'd rather keep the two apart than let one percentage sign flatten the difference.

The bottom of the list

Rank (of 37)	Country	Mapped spots	Notable	Documented share
37	Djibouti	1,567	0	0.0%
36	Sudan	1,489	2	0.1%
35	Chad	1,821	3	0.2%
34	Rwanda	3,168	6	0.2%
33	Nicaragua	1,201	3	0.2%
32	Cote d'Ivoire	1,872	6	0.3%
31	Zambia	1,120	5	0.4%
30	Colombia	5,577	37	0.7%
29	Canada	97,584	712	0.7%
28	Mexico	2,221	18	0.8%

Canada's seed-post distinction holds up under the fuller comparison. Among countries with a genuinely large mapped fishery, not just any country clearing the 1,000-spot bar, it's still the standout blind spot: 97,584 mapped spots, more than 12 times what Germany has, and a documented share of 0.73%, under a quarter of the global rate. Every other country in this bottom ten has a fishery an order of magnitude smaller. Canada is the only one where that low percentage represents tens of thousands of individually undocumented spots rather than a few thousand. That's not a rounding error, that's most of a continent's worth of water nobody has written a word about.

The average is doing a lot of work

Line up all 37 countries and the skew shows up immediately. The mean documented share is 4.9%, but the median is 2.3%, well under half of it. Nineteen of the 37, a majority, sit below the 3.04% global rate. A handful of countries at the top (Poland, Italy, the UK, Germany, and a few others in the high single digits) are doing all the work of pulling that average up. Most of the field clusters at or below it.

I keep coming back to what that means: the "average" documented-fishery rate isn't really an average experience anywhere. It's a number produced by a small cluster of countries, mostly in Europe, with an unusually deep habit of writing up their fishing water. Everyone else is closer to Canada than to Germany, and that has very little to do with how much water there is to fish.

Methodology & honest caveats

• Source: the same country-level totals behind our first post, WikiCatch's mapped fishing spots as of July 2026, with each spot's notability status ("notable" = a spot with a linked reference or sustained in-app ratings).
• Threshold: we limited the ranking to the 37 countries with at least 1,000 mapped spots. The excluded 157 countries have samples too small for a documented-share percentage to be a fair comparison; a country's absence from either table above says nothing about the quality of its fishing.
• Known bias: "documented share" measures how much writing and rating activity has accumulated around a country's mapped water, not how good or plentiful that water actually is. It reflects documentation and mapping culture, angling-community size, and platform history at least as much as it reflects the fisheries themselves. Djibouti's 0.0% means zero of its 1,567 mapped spots have cleared the notability bar in our data, not that the country has no fishing worth writing about.
• Small-sample caution applies at both ends of the top-ten table too: Poland, Italy, and the Netherlands rank high partly because a smaller total spot count makes a high percentage easier to reach. Germany is the only top-ten entry with a mapped fishery in the thousands, which is why we still treat it as the more meaningful benchmark of the two extremes, even sitting fourth on the raw list.
• Every number in this post is reproducible from the live dataset; nothing was hand-adjusted.

Data questions or corrections: hi@wikicatch.app. The full dataset is browsable in the WikiCatch app and on the map.