Fisheries independent trawl survey data of fish biomass on North American and European oceanic shelves.

Publicly available scientific bottom trawl survey data, primarily sampling demersal commercial species, were obtained from the Northeast Pacific and North Atlantic shelf regions in 2021. The final dataset contains approx. 197,000 unique tows and includes data from 1970 to 2019 (166,000 tows between 1980-2015). For each tow in each survey, we selected all teleost and elasmobranch species and obtained species weight. We corrected these weights for differences in sampling area (in km2) and trawl gear catchability.

The data processing scripts and individual survey data can be found on Github (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7992482). The data processing scripts are modified based on earlier work from Pinsky et al. (2013) and Maureaud et al. (2019).

If the correction for gear catchability is not important, it is recommended to use the FishGlob database (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7484547).

Please contact Daniel van Denderen (pdvd@aqua.dtu.dk) for questions.

Column names
Haul_id: unique haul identifyer
Survey_Region: survey name or name of ecoregion (depending on survey)
Gear: gear information (only included for northeast Atlantic region). Gear information is available for other regions. See original survey description (sources in manuscript).
Year: sampling year
Month: sampling month
Longitude: longitude (EPSG:4326)
Latitude: latitude (EPSG:4326)
Swept_area: estimate of swept area of survey gear (only included for northeast Atlantic region)
Bottom_depth: bottom depth in meters (as recorded in the survey data)
Family: taxonomic family of the teleost/elasmobranch
Name: species name (or higher taxonomic grouping)
kg_km2: wet weight (kilogram) per unit of swept area (km2)
kg_km2_corrected: wet weight (kilogram) per unit of swept area (km2) corrected for trawl gear catchability
F_type: fish type (demersal or pelagic)
Trophic_lev: Species-specific trophic level information

Data uncertainties
Data have predominantly been analysed at the community level and between 1980 and 2015. Any species-specific inferences may need further checking.

To reduce the effect of potential outlying biomass estimates, it is recommended to remove all individual observations 1.5 times less/greater than the interquantile range per survey and year based on log10-transformed biomass values.

Please contact Daniel van Denderen (pdvd@aqua.dtu.dk) for any comments/questions.