Commercial fish species reproduction and nursery ground

This dataset was managed for the aims of the project ECOSISTER (Ecosystem for Sustainable Transition in Emilia-Romagna), WP3 of Spoke 5 and provides the CPUE (Catch Per Unit of Effort) of fish species sampled in Valle Fattibello, a brackish (salinity ca. 13–31) lagoon in the north-western shore of the Adriatic Sea. Depth varies from a minimum of a few centimetres on the shallowest sandbars to a maximum of 3 m in the deepest channels (average depth 1 m).

The lagoon substrate is also very variable, including muds and silts as well as sands and harder substrates (mussel beds, shell hash). Water currents reshape the softer sediments, sometimes creating temporally shifting patterns of sandbars.

 The dataset is provided in two formats:

- Microsoft Excel XLSX file, including 3 sheets (Dataset, Fields and units, Taxonomy)

- CSV files (UTF-8), 3 files corresponding to the 3 sheets of the Excel file

The dataset includes total CPUE data for 32 fish species collected during the sampling as also their functional guild related to the use of the habitat.

Fish sampling was performed in 2009-2014 period at a fixed location on the banks of the Logonovo Channel, at the entrance of the lagoon, using stationary lift nets, a traditional fishing method in the area adapted to capture also juvenile individuals. Each species was assigned to a category based on their prevalent functional use of the lagoon for a total of four different categories, with the last one having three subcategories: Catadromous, Anadromous, Brackish (lagoon resident) and Marine (divided into feeding ground, nursery and stragglers subcategories). Marine species that enter the lagoon regularly to feed were categorized under ‘‘feeding ground,’’ those that live predominantly in the lagoon as juveniles were categorized under ‘‘nursery’’ and finally those that enter the lagoon only occasionally as ‘‘stragglers.’’ The fields are described in Table 1.

All the dataset fields are described in the Excel sheet/CSV file “Fields and units”, while the taxonomic related information for each taxon is provided in the Excel sheet/CSV file “Taxonomy”. Information extracted from the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS; https://marinespecies.org/) is provided here (see details in Table 2). ESRI Shapefile provides users with direct upload in any Geographic Information System (GIS). Nevertheless, due to this file format limitations, dataset field names have been truncated and/or renamed to fit 10 characters.

Table 1. Fields in the dataset (NA=not available).

Table 2. Provided taxonomic information.

A total of 33 fish species to the family of Alosidae (1), Anguillidae (1), Atherinidae (1), Belonidae (1), Blenniidae (1), Clupeidae (1), Cyprinodontidae (1), Engraulidae (1), Gobiidae (6), Triglidae (1), Moronidae (1), Mugilidae (5), Soleidae (4), Syngnathidae (2), Mullidae (1), Pleuronectidae (1), Sciaenidae (1), Scombridae (1), Scophthalmidae (1) were collected.

This dataset permitted to investigate fish movements between inner and outer habitats in a Northern Mediterranean coastal lagoon trough the publication of 3 scientific work Lanzoni, M., Gaglio, M., Gavioli, A., Anna Fano, E., & Castaldelli, G. (2021). Seasonal variation of functional traits in the fish community in a brackish lagoon of the Po River Delta (northern Italy). Water (Switzerland), 13(5). https://doi.org/10.3390/w13050679; Milardi, M., Gavioli, A., Lanzoni, M., Fano, E. A., & Castaldelli, G. (2019). Meteorological factors influence marine and resident fish movements in a brackish lagoon. Aquatic Ecology, 53(2), 251–263. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10452-019-09686-4-; Milardi, M., Lanzoni, M., Gavioli, A., Fano, E. A., & Castaldelli, G. (2018). Tides and moon drive fish movements in a brackish lagoon. Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science, 215, 207–214. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecss.2018.09.016. The information provided could improve the understanding of the drivers in these ecosystem as well as potentially provide useful insights for improved fisheries management.

The dataset provides information on the fish community and the environmental conditions that regulate their movement within a lagoon ecosystem. In fact, Valle Fattibello is a lagoon that, due to its ecological characteristics, provides information on the species composition and the relative stages of development of the fish community informative of the coastal area of the Emilia-Romagna region, from the Po Delta to Ravenna.