Updated and New Fish Abundance Data from Coastal Trawl Surveys

The NRHA is a collaborative, multi-disciplinary effort to describe and characterize estuarine, coastal, and offshore fish habitat distribution, abundance, and quality in the region. NRHA is led by the Mid-Atlantic and New England Fishery Management Councils with a dedicated Steering Committee. The NRHA team assembled and collated data from the federal trawl survey (operated by NOAA Fisheries) and the many state and coastal trawl and other fishery-independent surveys operated along the Atlantic coast over the past 60 years. These data and other data products are viewable in the Northeast Regional Habitat Assessment Data Explorer.

The Northeast and Mid-Atlantic ocean data portals and MDAT collaborated with the NRHA team to integrate a subset of the NRHA coastal trawl data products into the portals for users to access. As a result, the coastal fish abundance products on the portals now reflect several additional coastal trawl surveys that were not previously available. The new NRHA data products compile data from 16 coastal trawl surveys to summarize the relative abundance of 14 northeast/mid-Atlantic coastal fish species for spring and fall from 2010-2019 from Maine to Florida:

● American lobster

● Atlantic cod

● Bay anchovy

● Black sea bass

● Bluefish

● Haddock

● Little skate

● Longfin squid

● Scup

● Silver hake

● Striped bass

● Summer flounder

● Winter flounder

● Yellowtail flounder

The NRHA Maps and Methods Report includes more detail on the methods used to compile this dataset, the trawl source data, the trawl methods, and the additional species, years, and federal trawl datasets that NRHA also leverages in the dedicated NRHA Data Explorer. The NRHA Data Explorer includes additional data visualizations beyond those shown in the portals, with a key focus on species distribution maps that display mean abundance estimates across hexagonal grid cells. Their interactive visualization allows users to filter by species, trawl surveys (one or multiple), and year/year range, enabling a custom view of species abundance.

To access these new data layers, Mid-Atlantic Ocean Data Portal users can click the “Marine Life Library (Species Specific)” theme in the Data tab, then choose the “Fish BioMass NRHA Abundance” and select the species and season of interest to add to the map. There is also a layer “Coastal Trawl Extents” that will show the extent of the coastal trawls included in the NRHA data.

Please note that not all trawls are included in every species or season, so to understand which trawls were used to calculate the relative abundance of any given hexbin, click on that hexbin and the field “Trawl Sources” will identify the trawls used for that cell.

Join us for a special “How Tuesday” webinar focused on these data and the NRHA effort it was derived from on Jan. 27 at 11 a.m.

In this session, Duke University Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab (MGEL) Geospatial Analyst Sarah DeLand will provide an overview of the data, how it was compiled, and how to access them on the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast Ocean Data Portals. Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (MAFMC) Fishery Management Specialist Tori Kentner will share further background on NRHA and demonstrate how to access many additional marine life map products via the NRHA Data Explorer.

The webinar is open to the public and will include a Q&A with the presenters. Click here to register. A Zoom link will be provided upon registration.

Questions? Email portal@midatlanticocean.org.