Trawl gear configuration reporting and linking to individual fishing events

Gear details for each vessel were collated for each season. Where end dates for a particular gear configuration did not exist, they were inferred by assuming that each new gear configuration superseded the previous one (i.e., carrying forward the most recent prior value if multi-annual gaps occurred). This ensured that each vessel had a gear configuration assigned for every season, however a caveat is that these inferred configurations may not accurately reflect the actual gear used by the vessel in a given season.