Ability to download shapefiles for assessment areas

[WMRobin]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Not a problem per se, but I would like to be able to map the stocks in this dataset using shapefiles. The stocks are described as a couplet of species and area.

For example,

get_species_itis(stock = "Atlantic cod")
#> # A tibble: 3 × 3
#>   StockName                           Jurisdiction   ITIS
#>   <chr>                               <chr>         <dbl>
#> 1 Atlantic cod - Eastern Georges Bank NEFMC        164712
#> 2 Atlantic cod - Georges Bank         NEFMC        164712
#> 3 Atlantic cod - Gulf of Maine        NEFMC        164712

tells us there are three stocks of Atlantic cod. I have an idea of where the Eastern Georges Bank is, but I would like to have a formal shapefile to outline it.

Describe the solution you'd like
An ideal solution would be to have some function, say stocksmart::get_shape(location = "Eastern Georges Bank"), that downloads a SimpleFeatures or other Shape object in R for the requested location's shapefile.

But, a completely sufficient solution would be to just provide a link the shapefiles in this repo's ReadMe file.

Additional context
I am conducting a study in which I need to link recreational catch data from MRIP to fish stocks.

[andybeet]

Sorry for not responding earlier. This is a great idea!! I would love to implement this. However there is currenlty no database that houses the shape files for all of these stocks. I am not aware of a location that even houses any one of them. If you do i'd be happy to implement.

[andybeet]

@Dvandenderen Can you recommend sources? Greatly appreciated

[Dvandenderen]

A paper that produced these polygons is:
J. Rising & G. Heal, Global Benefits of Marine Protected Areas (nber.org/papers/w19982).
You can find the supplementary materials under "Associated Links."

However, I haven’t been able to locate the shapefiles themselves. I believe James Rising may have shared them with one of my former colleagues. Maybe that is the easiest way to get them (but let me know if I can assist further).

[andybeet]

Thanks @Dvandenderen
It looks like for the Northwest atlantic region (where i am located) the authors use NAFO (northwest atlantic fisheries organization) region definitions for stock area. This would be easy to extract from NAFO shapefiles. However, we use a finer resolution to define our stock areas. It appears for other parts of the USA, the authors use lat and lon to define stock area. I have no idea if that is how stocks are defined by stock assessments for these regions. I would presume not though.