Species counts, depth and latitude from NOAA's annual groundfish trawl surveys (1999-2018) in the Northeast Pacific

These data are provided as Supporting Information to the article appearing in Ecology Letters entitled: "Non-linear models of species' responses to environmental and spatial gradients".

The article describes a parametric framework for modelling species-environment non-linear relationships, including an R package ('senlm'), available on Github: https://primer-e.github.io/senlm. The framework has two components: (i) a non-linear parametric mathematical function to model the mean species response along a gradient that allows asymmetry, flattening/peakedness or bimodality; and (ii) a statistical error distribution tailored for ecological data types, allowing intrinsic mean-variance relationships and zero-inflation. The article demonstrates the utility of this model framework, highlighting the flexibility of a range of possible mean functions and a broad range of potential error distributions, in analyses of fish species' abundances along a depth gradient, and how they change over time and at different latitudes.

A vignette in R ('Vignette_S1.pdf') and associated R code ('Rcode_S1.txt') that utilise this dataset to demonstrate the senlm modeling framework are available as Supporting Information to the article.