A multi-annual (1958-2021), monthly resolved dataset of zooplankton community composition in the Northern and Southern North Sea used to illustrate Cyclical Ecological Trajectory Analysis (CETA)
Format
northseaZoo is an object of class list composed of 3 objects:
- Hellinger
a
data.framecontaining Hellinger-transformed zooplankton taxa abundances.- times
a vector indicating the date (in year) associated to each line in
Hellinger.- sites
a vector indicating the site (
"NNS"= Northern North Sea,"SNS"= Southern North Sea) associated to each line inHellinger.
Details
The data describes the zooplankton community in the North Sea sampled
by the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) survey.
The CPR survey operates through towing of CPR samplers across commercial routes of merchant ships
(plankton silk mesh = 270 μm, sampling depth = 5-10 m).
When brought back to the laboratory, plankton is counted and identified taxonomically following standardized protocols.
The raw data provided by the survey (DOI: 10.17031/66f12be296d70)
was reformated into two monthly-resolved time series of the commonest zooplankton taxa in the Northern North Sea
("NNS") and the Southern North Sea ("SNS"). During data processing, a smoothing was performed
by taking a rolling average (for each month, 5 values were averaged: a 3 months window + the corresponding month of the previous and next years).
The abundances were finally Hellinger-transformed, making them amenable to ecological diversity study.