Two new data products have recently been made available: a service through which time-series and spatial data on zooplankton can be explored and an online metadata catalogue for historical fisheries information such as landings and effort.
Plankton product
The zooplankton service is available in the form of a widget, built into the interactive spatial facility map in the ICES data portal. It allows users to visualize the average abundances of many species of zooplankton over the last 60 years in seasonal, annual, and decadal time frames – mainly focussing on the coastal northeast Atlantic.
The service, which hosts EMODnet biology data sourced from the Sir Alister Hardy foundation (SAHFOS), is one of the Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (OOPS) which are being developed as ICES moves towards making its ecosystem advice operational – defining and describing all the steps of the process that culminate in the final advice. OOPS products provide regular input of monitoring information on regional oceanography and hydrography. Part of this drive has included the recently published ecosystem overviews.
Back catalogue
Also available is a digital catalogue that contains all the historical metadata used by the Working Group on the History of Fish and Fisheries (WGHIST). Here, information is provided on long-term fisheries data (for example on landings and fishing effort) collated by researchers throughout the North Atlantic and beyond, together with a description and contact information for those interested in making use of the data.
WGHIST is a platform where researchers from the natural, social science and humanities disciplines come together to examine social-ecological changes through time, with a particular focus on how this understanding can be applied to present day science and management. The group met this year at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences' (SLU) Institute of Marine Research in Lysekil, Sweden.
