Title: Recovery of historic trawl data from the Canadian Arctic
 |
Principal Investigator Philippe Archambault, Université du Québec à Rimouski, Canada |
Project goals
To recover historic trawl data from the Canadian Arctic from non-digitized material with taxonomic identification of part of the species.
Results
Data from over 200 trawl hauls representing 141 stations and close to 1,000 species were digitized. Material from ~30 of those stations were taxonomically identified. The majority of the data (111 stations) stem from trawl conducted between 1951 and 1985 and are presence/absence data primarily from the Beaufort Sea and Hudson Bay areas. Those were complemented by abundance and biomass data from 2007 and 2008 trawls (30 stations). These data significantly improve the knowledge of the epibenthic megafauna from the Canadian Arctic. All data were included in a manuscript on shelf benthos biodiversity that is part of the ArcOD special issue in Marine Biodiversity. The complete data set from that manuscript will be submitted to the ArcOD database.
