Fish diversity data from the Barents Sea Ecosystem Survey 2004-2019

Abstract

Assessing and improving the status of biodiversity are main targets of international agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and the associated Aichi Biodiversity Targets for 2020. Here we present fish data from the Barents Sea Ecosystem Survey 2004-2019 on a format suitable for biodiversity assessments. The Barents Sea Ecosystem Survey is run jointly by the Institute of Marine Research (IMR, Norway) and the Polar Research Institute of Marine Fisheries and Oceanography (PINRO, Russia) - since 2019 - Polar Branch of Russian Federal Research Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography (VNIRO). We present a Barents Sea Fish Species Reference List that we use with the software StoX version 3.0 to translate and export data from raw data xlm -files in the NMDBiotic v3 format stored at IMR to a format suitable for diversity analysis. Finally, we present some example results based on the fish data from the Barents Sea ecosystem survey 2004-2019.