Projected Groundfish Occurrence in Northeastern Pacific Under Climate Scenarios

Fisheries and Oceans Canada provides projections for 34 groundfish species occurrence in a 3 km² grid for British Columbia and Washington waters. The dataset includes historical baseline and future projections under two emissions scenarios from two regional ocean models, with mean occurrence and 95% confidence intervals. Data is derived from fisheries-independent trawl surveys from 2000 to 2019 combined with high-resolution ocean models.

Use Cases

• Modeling species distribution shifts based on projected temperature and oxygen changes.
• Assessing biodiversity turnover in marine communities based on depth-stratified projections.
• Validating species distribution models (SDMs) using forecasting accuracy metrics mentioned for 34 species.
• Analyzing climate change impacts on commercial fisheries based on groundfish occurrence data.

Strengths

• Includes projections for 34 groundfish species with validated forecasting ability.
• Provides data under two distinct emissions scenarios from two regional ocean models (BCCM and NEP36).
• Contains both mean projected occurrence and lower/upper 95% confidence intervals for each projection layer.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Fisheries and Oceans Canada

Collection Method

Combined fisheries-independent trawl survey data (2000-2019) with high-resolution regional ocean models using generalized linear models (GLMs).

Time Range

Historical baseline and future projections.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03 24 09:02:22.410176; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Northeastern Pacific waters, specifically British Columbia (Canada) and Washington (USA).