Placentia Bay Nearshore Fish Community Sampling, 2018-2022

Fisheries and Oceans Canada collected annual data on juvenile fish and invertebrate communities at 14 sites in Placentia Bay from 2018 to 2022. The program used beach seining, visual habitat transects, CTD profiles, and eDNA sampling to gather information on diversity, abundance, distribution, size, and habitat. This record contains the geographic locations of the sites and information on the timing and type of data collected.

Use Cases

• Modeling juvenile Atlantic cod distribution and abundance based on seine catch data.
• Analyzing relationships between fish communities and habitat types based on visual transect data.
• Investigating environmental gradients using temperature, salinity, and depth profiles from CTD casts.
• Comparing species detection methods by integrating eDNA results with traditional seine sampling.

Strengths

• Data collected annually for 5 years (2018-2022), providing a multi-year time series.
• Sampling at 14 fixed sites allows for spatial comparison within Placentia Bay.
• Multiple complementary data types (seine, habitat, CTD, eDNA) collected at each site.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to a single bay in Newfoundland.

Provenance

Source

Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Coastal and Freshwater Ecology Section

Collection Method

Boat-based beach seining, visual habitat transects, CTD casts, and eDNA sampling.

Time Range

2018-2022

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-24 08:36:52.877452

Geography

Placentia Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada (14 sites)