This visualization product displays marine macro-litter (> 2.5cm) material categories percentages per beach per year from non-MSFD monitoring surveys, research & cleaning operations. EMODnet Chemistry included the collection of marine litter in its 3rd phase. Since the beginning of 2018, data of beach litter have been gathered and processed in the EMODnet Chemistry Marine Litter Database (MLDB). The harmonization of all the data has been the most challenging task considering the heterogeneity of the data sources, sampling protocols and reference lists used on a European scale. Preliminary processings were necessary to harmonize all the data: - Exclusion of OSPAR 1000 protocol: in order to follow the approach of OSPAR that it is not including these data anymore in the monitoring; - Selection of surveys from non-MSFD monitoring, cleaning and research operations; - Exclusion of beaches without coordinates; - Exclusion of surveys without associated length; - Some litter types like organic litter, small fragments (paraffin and wax; items > 2.5cm) and pollutants have been removed. The list of selected items is attached to this metadata. This list was created using EU Marine Beach Litter Baselines, the European Threshold Value for Macro Litter on Coastlines and the Joint list of litter categories for marine macro-litter monitoring from JRC (these three documents are attached to this metadata); - Exclusion of the "feaces" category: it concerns more exactly the items of dog excrements in bags of the OSPAR (item code: 121) and ITA (item code: IT59) reference lists; - Normalization of survey lengths to 100m & 1 survey / year: in some case, the survey length was not 100m, so in order to be able to compare the abundance of litter from different beaches a normalization is applied using this formula: Number of items (normalized by 100 m) = Number of litter per items x (100 / survey length) Then, this normalized number of items is summed to obtain the total normalized number of litter for each survey. To calculate the percentage for each material category, formula applied is: Material (%) = (∑number of items (normalized at 100 m) of each material category)*100 / (∑number of items (normalized at 100 m) of all categories) The material categories differ between reference lists (OSPAR, TSG-ML, UNEP, UNEP-MARLIN, JLIST). In order to apply a common procedure for all the surveys, the material categories have been harmonized. More information is available in the attached documents. Warning: the absence of data on the map does not necessarily mean that they do not exist, but that no information has been entered in the Marine Litter Database for this area.

This visualization product displays the fishing & aquaculture related plastic items abundance of marine macro-litter (> 2.5cm) per beach per year from Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) monitoring surveys. EMODnet Chemistry included the collection of marine litter in its 3rd phase. Since the beginning of 2018, data of beach litter have been gathered and processed in the EMODnet Chemistry Marine Litter Database (MLDB). The harmonization of all the data has been the most challenging task considering the heterogeneity of the data sources, sampling protocols and reference lists used on a European scale. Preliminary processings were necessary to harmonize all the data: - Exclusion of OSPAR 1000 protocol: in order to follow the approach of OSPAR that it is not including these data anymore in the monitoring; - Selection of MSFD surveys only (exclusion of other monitoring, cleaning and research operations); - Exclusion of beaches without coordinates; - Selection of plastic bags related items only. The list of selected items is attached to this metadata. This list was created using EU Marine Beach Litter Baselines, the European Threshold Value for Macro Litter on Coastlines and the Joint list of litter categories for marine macro-litter monitoring from JRC (these three documents are attached to this metadata); - Normalization of survey lengths to 100m & 1 survey / year: in some case, the survey length was not exactly 100m, so in order to be able to compare the abundance of litter from different beaches a normalization is applied using this formula: Number of plastic bags related items of the survey (normalized by 100 m) = Number of plastic bags related items of the survey x (100 / survey length) Then, this normalized number of plastic bags related items is summed to obtain the total normalized number of plastic bags related items for each survey. Finally, the median abundance of plastic bags related items for each beach and year is calculated from these normalized abundances of plastic bags related items per survey. Sometimes the survey length was null or equal to 0. Assuming that the MSFD protocol has been applied, the length has been set at 100m in these cases. Percentiles 50, 75, 95 & 99 have been calculated taking into account plastic bags related items from MSFD data for all years. More information is available in the attached documents. Warning: the absence of data on the map does not necessarily mean that they do not exist, but that no information has been entered in the Marine Litter Database for this area.

EMODnet Chemistry aims to provide access to marine chemistry datasets and derived data products concerning eutrophication, acidity and contaminants. The importance of the selected substances and other parameters relates to the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). This aggregated dataset contains all unrestricted EMODnet Chemistry data on eutrophication and acidity, and covers the Northeast Atlantic Ocean (40W). Data were aggregated and quality controlled by 'IFREMER / IDM / SISMER - Scientific Information Systems for the SEA' in France. ITS-90 water temperature and water body salinity variables have also been included ('as are') to complete the eutrophication and acidity data. If you use these variables for calculations, please refer to SeaDataNet for the quality flags: https://www.seadatanet.org/Products/Aggregated-datasets . Regional datasets concerning eutrophication and acidity are automatically harvested, and the resulting collections are aggregated and quality controlled using ODV Software and following a common methodology for all sea regions ( https://doi.org/10.13120/8xm0-5m67 ). Parameter names are based on P35 vocabulary, which relates to EMODnet Chemistry aggregated parameter names and is available at: https://vocab.nerc.ac.uk/search_nvs/P35/ . When not present in original data, water body nitrate plus nitrite was calculated by summing all nitrate and nitrite parameters. The same procedure was applied for water body dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN), which was calculated by summing all nitrate, nitrite, and ammonium parameters. Concentrations per unit mass were converted to a unit volume using a constant density of 1.025 kg/L. The aggregated dataset can also be downloaded as an ODV collection and spreadsheet, which is composed of a metadata header followed by tab separated values. This spreadsheet can be imported to ODV Software for visualisation (more information can be found at: https://www.seadatanet.org/Software/ODV ).

This visualization product displays the type of litter in percent per net per year from specific protocols different from research and monitoring protocols. EMODnet Chemistry included the collection of marine litter in its 3rd phase. Before 2021, there was no coordinated effort at the regional or European scale for micro-litter. Given this situation, EMODnet Chemistry proposed to adopt the data gathering and data management approach as generally applied for marine data, i.e., populating metadata and data in the CDI Data Discovery and Access service using dedicated SeaDataNet data transport formats. EMODnet Chemistry is currently the official EU collector of micro-litter data from Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) National Monitoring activities (descriptor 10). A series of specific standard vocabularies or standard terms related to micro-litter have been added to SeaDataNet NVS (NERC Vocabulary Server) Common Vocabularies to describe the micro-litter. European micro-litter data are collected by the National Oceanographic Data Centres (NODCs). Micro-litter map products are generated from NODCs data after a test of the aggregated collection including data and data format checks and data harmonization. A filter is applied to represent only micro-litter sampled according to a very specific protocol such as the Volvo Ocean Race (VOR) or Oceaneye. To calculate percentages for each type, formula applied is: Type (%) = (∑number of particles of each type)*100 / (∑number of particles of all type) When the number of micro-litters was not filled or was equal to zero, it was not possible to calculate the percentage. Standard vocabularies for micro-litter types are taken from Seadatanet's H01 library (https://vocab.seadatanet.org/v_bodc_vocab_v2/search.asp?lib=H01). Some morphological types of micro-litters may have been sampled but were not defined by the protocole applied during the survey. They are represented as « undefined micro-litter items ». Warnings: - the absence of data on the map does not necessarily mean that they do not exist, but that no information has been entered in the National Oceanographic Data Centre (NODC) for this area. - since 03/07/2023, the preferred label « Undefined micro-litter items » has been integrated into the H01 library whereas the labels « microplastic items », « non-plastic man-made micro-particles (e.g. glass, metal, tar) » and «non-plastic filaments (natural fibres, rubber) » have been deprecated. When defined, the material or polymer type can be checked directly in the source data.

In recent years, large datasets of in situ marine carbonate system parameters (partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2), total alkalinity, dissolved inorganic carbon and pH) have been collated. These carbonate system datasets have highly variable data density in both space and time, especially in the case of pCO2, which is routinely measured at high frequency using underway measuring systems. This variation in data density can create biases when the data are used, for example for algorithm assessment, favouring datasets or regions with high data density. A common way to overcome data density issues is to bin the data into cells of equal latitude and longitude extent. This leads to bins with spatial areas that are latitude and projection dependent (eg become smaller and more elongated as the poles are approached). Additionally, as bin boundaries are defined without reference to the spatial distribution of the data or to geographical features, data clusters may be divided sub-optimally (eg a bin covering a region with a strong gradient). To overcome these problems and to provide a tool for matching in situ data with satellite, model and climatological data, which often have very different spatiotemporal scales both from the in situ data and from each other, a methodology has been created to group in situ data into ‘regions of interest’, spatiotemporal cylinders consisting of circles on the Earth’s surface extending over a period of time. These regions of interest are optimally adjusted to contain as many in situ measurements as possible. All in situ measurements of the same parameter contained in a region of interest are collated, including estimated uncertainties and regional summary statistics. The same grouping is done for each of the other datasets, producing a dataset of matchups. About 35 million in situ datapoints were then matched with data from five satellite sources and five model and re-analysis datasets to produce a global matchup dataset of carbonate system data, consisting of 287,000 regions of interest spanning 54 years from 1957 to 2023. Each region of interest is 50 km in diameter and 5 days in duration, improving the spatial and temporal resolution of the previous version (v3.4). The list of sources added in this dataset includes: - sea surface temperature and sea ice concentration from Copernicus Climate Service Multi-satellite L4 (http://dx.doi.org/10.5285/62c0f97b1eac4e0197a674870afe1ee6) - sea surface salinity from the Copernicus Marine service Multi Observation Global Ocean Sea Surface Salinity and Sea Surface Density (https://doi.org/10.48670/moi-00051) - Surface ocean sea-air CO2 fluxes and total alkalinity from ETH Zurich OceanSODA-ETHZ-v2 gridded dataset (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11206366) - salinity and mixed layer depth from SODA v3.4.2 reanalysis (https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-18-0149.1) - chlorophyll-A from ESA Ocean Colour CCI v6 (doi:10.3390/s19194285) - wind at 10 m and mean sea level pressure from ERA5 reanalysis - nitrate, silicate, phosphate, oxygen, temperature and salinity from World Ocean Atlas 2018 - sea level anomaly from Global Ocean Gridded L4 Sea Surface Heights And Derived Variables Multi-Year dataset by Copernicus Marine Service Information (https://doi.org/10.48670/moi-00148) - sea surface salinity from ESA Salinity CCI L4 v3.2.1 (https://dx.doi.org/10.5285/5920a2c77e3c45339477acd31ce62c3c) - sea surface salinity from JPL SMAP Level 3 CAP Sea Surface Salinity (https://doi.org/10.5067/SMP40-3SPCS) - temperature and salinity from Coriolis Observation Re-Analysis CORA5.2 by Copernicus Marine Service (https://doi.org/10.17882/46219) - subskin sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST SST (http://doi.org/10.5067/GHAAO-4BC01) - sea surface salinity from the Arctic salinity dataset (https://doi.org/10.20350/digitalCSIC/9065) the Barcelona Expert Center (http://bec.icm.csic.es/) - pH and spCO2 from Copernicus Marine Service Surface Ocean Carbon Dataset (https://doi.org/10.48670/moi-00047) An example application, the reparameterisation of a global total alkalinity algorithm, is shown. This matchup dataset can be updated as and when in situ and other datasets are updated, and similar datasets at finer spatiotemporal scale can be constructed, for example to enable regional studies. This dataset was funded by ESA OceanHealth / Ocean Acidification project which aims at developing the use of satellite Earth Observation for studying and monitoring marine carbonate chemistry.

The ICES Working Group on Fisheries Benthic Impact and Trade-offs (WGFBIT) has developed an assessment framework based on the life history trait longevity, to evaluate the benthic impact of fisheries at the regional scale. In order to apply this framework to the Mediterranean sea, several Mediterranean longevity databases were merged together with existing North-East Atlantic ones to develop a common database. Longevity was fuzzy coded into four longevity classes: <1, 1-3, 3-10 and >10 years. Both benthic mega and macrofauna organisms are included in this dataset. Further details about both the purpose and the methodology may be found in ICES (2022) and Cuyvers et al. (2023). The result of the final dataset merging is one dataset containing the fuzzy coded average longevity (and standard deviation) for 2264 taxa and for each, the number of databases used. 

The ESA Sea State Climate Change Initiative (CCI) project has produced global multi-sensor time-series of along-track satellite altimeter significant wave height data (referred to as Level 2P (L2P) data) with a particular focus for use in climate studies. This dataset contains the Version 4 Remote Sensing Significant Wave Height product, which provides along-track data at approximately 6 km spatial resolution, separated per satellite and pass, including all measurements with flags, bias corrections and extra parameters from other sources. These are expert products with rich content and no data loss. The altimeter data used in the Sea State CCI dataset v4 come from multiple satellite missions spanning from 1992 to 2023 (ERS-1, ERS-2, Envisat, CryoSat-2, Jason-1, Jason-2, Jason-3, SARAL, Sentinel-3 A, Sentinel-3 B, Sentinel-6 A), therefore spanning over a larger time range than the previous version 3. The missions already retracked (with WHALES) in version 3 were not reprocessed, but extended when applicable. Many altimeters are bi-frequency (Ku-C or Ku-S) and only measurements in Ku band were used, for consistency reasons, being available on each altimeter but SARAL (Ka band). **The version 4 of this dataset now supersedes the previous version 3.**

In October 2019 we chose 15 sites from the 2019 EVHOE survey for environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling. The French international EVHOE bottom trawl survey is carried out annually during autumn in the BoB to monitor demersal fish resources. At each site, we sampled seawater using Niskin bottles deployed with a circular rosette. There were nine bottles on the rosette, each of them able to hold ∼5 l of water. At each site, we first cleaned the circular rosette and bottles with freshwater, then lowered the rosette (with bottles open) to 5 m above the sea bottom, and finally closed the bottles remotely from the boat. The 45 l of sampled water was transferred to four disposable and sterilized plastic bags of 11.25 l each to perform the filtration on-board in a laboratory dedicated to the processing of eDNA samples. To speed up the filtration process, we used two identical filtration devices, each composed of an Athena® peristaltic pump (Proactive Environmental Products LLC, Bradenton, Florida, USA; nominal flow of 1.0 l min–1 ), a VigiDNA 0.20 μm filtration capsule (SPYGEN, le Bourget du Lac, France), and disposable sterile tubing. Each filtration device filtered the water contained in two plastic bags (22.5 l), which represent two replicates per sampling site. We followed a rigorous protocol to avoid contamination during fieldwork, using disposable gloves and single-use filtration equipment and plastic bags to process each water sample. At the end of each filtration, we emptied the water inside the capsule that we replaced by 80 ml of CL1 conservation buffer and stored the samples at room temperature following the specifications of the manufacturer (SPYGEN, Le Bourget du Lac, France). We processed the eDNA capsules at SPYGEN, following the protocol proposed by Polanco-Fernández et al., (2020). Half of the extracted DNA was processed by Sinsoma using newly developped ddPCR assays for European seabass (Dicentrachus labrax), European hake (Merluccius merluccius) and blackspot seabream (Pagellus bogaraveo).  The other half of the extracted DNA was analysed using metabarcoding with teleo primer. The raw metabarcoding data set is available at https://www.doi.org/10.16904/envidat.442 Bottom trawling using a GOV trawl was carried out before or after water sampling. The catch was sorted by species and catches in numbers and weight were recorded. No blackspot seabream individuals were caught.   Data content: * ddPCR/: contains the ddPCR counts and DNA concentrations for each sample and species. * SampleInfo/: contains the filter volume for each eDNA sample. * StationInfo/: contains metadata related to the data collected in the field for each filter. * Metabarcoding/: contains metabarcoding results for teleoprimer. * Trawldata/: contains catch data in numbers and weight (kg).      

In order to better characterize the population structure of common dolphins (Delphinus delphis) in the Bay of Biscay, a single digest RADseq (SbfI enzyme) protocol was used to obtain paired-end, 150bp NGS sequences on the Illumina NovaSeq 6000 sequencing platform. D. delphis samples from the Western North Atlantic, and samples from three other delphinid species were included as outgroups.

This visualization product displays the density of floating micro-litter per net normalized in grams per km² per year from research and monitoring protocols. EMODnet Chemistry included the collection of marine litter in its 3rd phase. Before 2021, there was no coordinated effort at the regional or European scale for micro-litter. Given this situation, EMODnet Chemistry proposed to adopt the data gathering and data management approach as generally applied for marine data, i.e., populating metadata and data in the CDI Data Discovery and Access service using dedicated SeaDataNet data transport formats. EMODnet Chemistry is currently the official EU collector of micro-litter data from Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) National Monitoring activities (descriptor 10). A series of specific standard vocabularies or standard terms related to micro-litter have been added to SeaDataNet NVS (NERC Vocabulary Server) Common Vocabularies to describe the micro-litter. European micro-litter data are collected by the National Oceanographic Data Centres (NODCs). Micro-litter map products are generated from NODCs data after a test of the aggregated collection including data and data format checks and data harmonization. A filter is applied to represent only micro-litter sampled according to research and monitoring protocols as MSFD monitoring. Densities were calculated for each net using the following calculation: Density (weight of particles per km²) = Micro-litter weight / (Sampling effort (km) * Net opening (cm) * 0.00001) When information about the sampling effort (km) was lacking and point coordinates were known (start and end of the sampling), the sampling effort was calculated using the PostGIS ST_DistanceSpheroid function with a WGS84 measurement spheroid. When the weight of microlitters or the net opening was not filled, it was not possible to calculate the density. Percentiles 50, 75, 95 & 99 have been calculated taking into account data for all years. Warning: the absence of data on the map does not necessarily mean that they do not exist, but that no information has been entered in the National Oceanographic Data Centre (NODC) for this area.