Fisheries and Oceans Canada

The Planning for an Environmental Response (PIER) initiative falls under the umbrella of the Government of Canada’s Oceans Protection Plan (OPP), whose goal is preserving marine ecosystems vulnerable to increased transportation and the development of the marine industry. The PIERs’ main mandate...

This dataset includes metrics of seagrass productivity and resilience collected from field sites along the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia, Canada. Field sites were located across a gradient of temperature and light conditions. Sampling was conducted monthly from May 2018 to July 2019. Seagrass...

The Brier Island/Digby Neck area has been identified as an Ecologically and Biologically Significant Area (EBSA) by Fisheries and Oceans Canada and is one of four marine areas within the Bay of Fundy recognised by Parks Canada as of national significance for marine conservation planning. The area...

In July and August of 2019, a remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS) project was undertaken in Canada’s western Arctic along the Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk (ITH) and Dempster highways. The objective of this project was to test long-range RPAS missions for photogrammetric data acquisition and...

In July and August of 2019, a remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS) project was undertaken in Canada’s western Arctic along the Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk (ITH) and Dempster highways. The objective of this project was to test long-range RPAS missions for photogrammetric data acquisition and...

The blue whale (Balaenopterus musculus) is a wide-ranging cetacean that can be found in all oceans, inhabiting coastal and oceanic habitats. In the North Atlantic, little is known about blue whale distribution and genetic structure, and if whether animals found in Icelandic waters, the Azores, or...

Funded through DFO's Strategic Program for Ecosystem-based Research and Advice (SPERA), this benthic survey covers several seabed areas adjacent to Deer Island and Campobello Island, the Wolves Islands, and Grand Manan (NB) over a two-year study period (2016-2017). One hundred and fifty drift...

The Coastal Biodiversity Trawl Survey for the Passamaquoddy Bay was conducted annually between July to October from 2009 to 2019. This survey was intended to monitor long-term change in local species presence, habitat utilization, and health. The sampling activities support coastal research in...

The data layer (.shp) presented is the result of an unsupervised classification method for classifying seafloor habitat on German Bank (off South West Nova Scotia, Canada). This method involves separating environmental variables derived from multibeam bathymetry (Slope, Curvature) and backscatter...

PURPOSE: Establishing efficient, non-destructive sampling methods for clam population assessments. DESCRIPTION: In the Gulf of St. Lawrence (GSL) Management Region, clam assessments are uncommon due to limited resources and the labour-intensive nature of sampling clam beds....

Kernel density estimation (KDE) utilizes spatially explicit data to model the distribution of a variable of interest. It is a simple non-parametric neighbour-based smoothing function that relies on few assumptions about the structure of the observed data. It has been used in ecology to identify...

Since 2005, Fisheries and Oceans Canada has been collecting monitoring data for aquatic invasive species (e.g. https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/8d87f574-0661-40a0-822f-e9eabc35780d, https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/503a957e-7d6b-11e9-aef3-f48c505b2a29,...

Significant Benthic Areas are defined in DFO's Ecological Risk Assessment Framework (ERAF) as "significant areas of cold-water corals and sponge dominated communities", where significance is determined "through guidance provided by DFO-lead processes based on current knowledge of such species,...

The Scotian Shelf population of northern bottlenose whales (Hyperoodon ampullatus) is listed as Endangered under Canada’s Species at Risk Act. Partial critical habitat was identified for this population in the Recovery Strategy first published in 2010 (Fisheries and Oceans Canada 2016), and three...

In 2012 and 2013, Fisheries and Oceans Canada surveyed the benthos in two areas closed to bottom contact fishing, the Narwhal Overwintering and Coldwater Coral Zone (now the Disko Fan Conservation Area, DFCA), and the Hatton Basin Voluntary Coral Protection Zone (now the Hatton Basin Conservation...

A benthic imagery survey was conducted along the Eastern Scotian Slope in June 2018 to collect data in support of a Strategic Program for Ecosystem-Based Research and Advice project to evaluate the effectiveness of the Lophelia Coral Conservation Area and identify new areas of importance for...

Emerald Basin on the Scotian Shelf off Nova Scotia, Canada, is home to a globally unique aggregation of the glass sponge Vazella pourtalesi, first documented in the region in 1889. In 2009, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) implemented two Sponge Conservation Areas to protect these sponge...

The annual summer scallop surveys on the principal grounds in the Bay of Fundy follow stratified-random designs. The gear comprises a ‘Digby scallop drag’ with four ‘buckets’, each of 760 mm inside width, their bags being made of 74 mm steel-wire rings linked by rubber washers. A comparative data...

PURPOSE: In this study, we examined the structure and function of the Southampton Island marine food web across 149 species of benthic and pelagic invertebrates, fishes, marine mammals and seabirds collected from 2016 to 2019, to provide a baseline for future studies that aim to quantify...

This dataset accompanies the open access article "Improving satellite chlorophyll-a retrieval in the turbid waters of the Bay of Fundy, Canada" published in Estuaries and Coasts (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12237-024-01334-x). A full methods description is provided in the article. Briefly, we...