Modelled distributions of fish and epibenthic invertebrates in the southern North Sea

These data include distribution maps of fish and invertabrate species in the southern North Sea from 2014 until 2023. The maps are modelled using point data of presence/absence and biomass (per trawled km²) from scientific fisheries surveys to estimate the distribution of the probability of occurrence (POC) or biomass (kg per km²), respectively. Also included are forecasts of species' distributions assuming increasing water temperatures in the southern North Sea according to the ICCP scenario RCP8.5.

Each files contains a raster stack with layers for each species. The data can be read into the R using the 'stack'-command from the 'raster'-package. The raster stacks contain layers with headers, which code the species and size group. For some species of relevance to fisheries managment, Numbers behind the latin names of the species give information on the included size classes in cm with 'no' indicating no size class information was available.

The file names are composed of the follwing elements:

'bio' = biomass

'poc' = probability of occurrence

'emp' = observed occurrence/abundance data from fisheries surveys with employed spatial smoother

'sdm' = modelled distributin data from random forests

'fc' = forecast distributions based on temperature predictors according to RCP8.5

'rel.ca2' = core areas (CA) of distribution representing values > then the mid-point of modelled POC value range

Year numbers give the time frame of empirical data or model predictions. 

You can access the .tiff-files with the following R-commands using the directory path where you have stored the files:

library(raster)

poc<-stack("your_path/poc.sdm.2014_2023.tiff")

poc$gadus.morhua_5_113 # Plots distribution of Atlantic cod as probability of occurrence observed at a size range from 5 - 113 cm tail length