International fishing effort distribution in 2012 was calculated for large beam trawlers (>221kW, >24m) in the German EEZ of the North Sea. It was quantified as swept area ratio, which is the ratio between the trawled area over one year and the size of the respective grid cell. Thus, a swept area ratio of 1 means that an area equivalent to the size of the grid cell was fished over one year. The swept area was calculated from data from Vessel monitoring by satellite (VMS) using the approximate width of the first gear of the ship, taken from the European Fleet register. Cell sizes were assigned using the nested grid approach following Gerritsen et al. 2013 (ICES J. Mar. Sci. 70: 523-531), with approximately 3552km² (corresponding to a resolution of 1°x0.5° at 55°N) as the coarsest and approximately 3.5km² as the finest resolution of grid cells, whereas the resolution depends on the amount of information (GPS data from fishing vessels) within a spatial grid.