This data product selects sample areas of digital bathymetry, chosen for their relevance to marine activities and data sources alternative to GEBCO. The approach for building the digital map of water depth is to use GEBCO as a baseline and look at a set of sample areas where GEBCO could be improved upon. Sample areas have also been selected to be representative of each continent bordering the Atlantic and expected future requirements. Data sources include GEBCO, EMODNET, USGS and CHS.

Species distribution models (GAM, Maxent and Random Forest ensemble) predicting the distribution of discrete Lophelia pertusa - Desmophylum pertusum colonies assemblage in the Celtic Sea. This community is considered ecologically coherent according to the cluster analysis conducted by Parry et al. (2015) on image samples. Modelling its distribution complements existing work on their definition and offers a representation of the extent of the areas of the North East Atlantic where they can occur based on the best available knowledge. This work was performed at the University of Plymouth in 2021.

The raster dataset represents the risk of collision of whales with vessels in Europe Seas. The most vulnerable species from ship strikes are cetaceans and turtles, since they go to the surface to breathe. On the other hand, their migration routes can overlap with shipping lanes. The collisions can produce the death or injury of the animals, and are an important threat for the conservation of these species. The dataset has been prepared in the context of the development of the first European Maritime Transport Environmental Report (EMSA-EEA report, 2021: https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/maritime-transport).

Coastal zones are presented as a series of 10 consecutive buffers of 1km width each (towards inland). For this dataset, were treated as sea data all areas with a class value of 523 (sea and ocean) in Corine Land Cover (details in lineage).

The raster dataset represents bycatch fishing intensity (kilowatt per fishing hour) from bottom touching mobile gears in the European seas. The dataset has been derived from Automatic Identification System (AIS) based demersal fishing intensity data received from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre - Independent experts of the Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries (JRC STECF) as well as Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) and logbook based demersal fishing intensity data downloaded from from OSPAR and HELCOM Commissions. The temporal extent varies between the data sources (between 2014 and 2017). OSPAR and HELCOM data superseded the JRC STECF data where they overlapped spatially. The cell values have been transformed into a logarithmic scale (ln1). This dataset has been prepared for the calculation of the combined effect index, produced for the ETC/ICM Report 4/2019 "Multiple pressures and their combined effects in Europe's seas" available on: https://www.eionet.europa.eu/etcs/etc-icm/etc-icm-report-4-2019-multiple-pressures-and-their-combined-effects-in-europes-seas-1.

Species distribution models (GAM, Maxent and Random Forest ensemble) predicting the distribution of Syringammina fragilissima fields assemblage in the North East Atlantic. This community is considered ecologically coherent according to the cluster analysis conducted by Parry et al. (2015) on image sample. Modelling its distribution complements existing work on their definition and offers a representation of the extent of the areas of the North East Atlantic where they can occur based on the best available knowledge. This work was performed at the University of Plymouth in 2021.

The GEBCO_2022 Grid is a global continuous terrain model for ocean and land with a spatial resolution of 15 arc seconds. In regions outside of the Arctic Ocean area, the grid uses as a base Version 2.4 of the SRTM15_plus data set (Tozer, B. et al, 2019). This data set is a fusion of land topography with measured and estimated seafloor topography. Included on top of this base grid are gridded bathymetric data sets developed by the four Regional Centers of The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project. The GEBCO_2022 Grid represents all data within the 2022 compilation. The compilation of the GEBCO_2022 Grid was carried out at the Seabed 2030 Global Center, hosted at the National Oceanography Centre, UK, with the aim of producing a seamless global terrain model. Outside of Polar regions, the Regional Centers provide their data sets as sparse grids i.e. only grid cells that contain data are populated. These data sets were included on to the base using a remove-restore blending procedure. This is a two-stage process of computing the difference between the new data and the base grid and then gridding the difference and adding the difference back to the existing base grid. The aim is to achieve a smooth transition between the new and base data sets with the minimum of perturbation of the existing base data set. The data sets supplied in the form of complete grids (primarily areas north of 60N and south of 50S) were included using feather blending techniques from GlobalMapper software. The GEBCO_2022 Grid has been developed through the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project. This is a collaborative project between the Nippon Foundation of Japan and the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO). It aims to bring together all available bathymetric data to produce the definitive map of the world ocean floor by 2030 and make it available to all. Funded by the Nippon Foundation, the four Seabed 2030 Regional Centers include the Southern Ocean - hosted at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany; South and West Pacific Ocean - hosted at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, New Zealand; Atlantic and Indian Oceans - hosted at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, USA; Arctic and North Pacific Oceans - hosted at Stockholm University, Sweden and the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire, USA.