Fisheries and Oceans Canada

PURPOSE: This data relates to the Canadian Science Advice Secretariat (CSAS) Regional Science Advisory Process from the Limit Reference Point and Population Model Review of the Southern Gulf of Saint Lawrence Sea Scallop peer review meeting held on November 1-2, 2023. The SFAs 22 and 24 have...

Estuaries are highly productive and diverse ecosystems that represent a geographic bottleneck between marine and freshwater systems. Estuaries have been identified as ecologically and biologically significant areas (EBSAs) in Canada’s Pacific Region because of their importance for the...

Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) Maritime Science Branch has collected grain size data from sediment and water column samples using bottle samples, sediment cores, and sediment grabs as part of numerous research projects not only in the Atlantic provinces, but also worldwide. The data collected...

Monitoring programs are an important component of Marine Protected Area (MPA) management, providing requisite information on the state of, and changes in, protected ecosystems. Monitoring is required to gauge the efficacy of MPAs towards their conservation objectives and provides information...

The shallow, coastal regions of the world’s oceans are highly productive ecosystems providing important habitat for commercial, forage, endangered, and iconic species. Given the diversity of ecosystem services produced or supported by this ecosystem, a better understanding of its structure and...

Canadian tides and water level station information, benchmarks, observed water level data, and tidal predictions. The Canadian tide and water level data archive presently holds water level observations reported from over a thousand stations, with the earliest dating back to 1848. The number of...

Ecologically and Biologically Significant Areas (EBSAs) are areas within Canada's oceans that have been identified through formal scientific assessments as having special biological or ecological significance when compared with the surrounding marine ecosystem. Failure to define an area as an...

The endangered St. Lawrence Estuary (SLE) beluga population is in decline and has shown no signs of recovery despite multiple protection measures. Changes in prey availability and exposure to organohalogen contaminants have been proposed as potential factors limiting the its recovery. Studies on...

Funded under DFO's Marine Conservation Targets Program, this optical imagery benthic survey captured 16 drift-camera transects in the St. Anns Bank Marine Protected Area (MPA - 4364 km2) and 2 coastal transects west of the MPA, Atlantic Canada from August 15-23, 2023. High-resolution still images...

Description: Seasonal climatologies for Zooplankton biomass in seven size categories were calculated for the period 1990-2019. The data used were a subset of the Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Institute of Ocean Sciences Zooplankton Database. This dataset is incomplete and is regularly updated...

Funded under DFO's Marine Conservation Targets Program, this optical imagery benthic survey captured 24 drift-camera transects from September 22-26, 2023 in the Quoddy Region of the lower, western Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick, Canada. The survey area includes Passamaquoddy Bay, the 'Head...

The Science Branch of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) in the Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) region has been conducting multispecies research vessel (RV) surveys using a stratified random survey design since the early 1970s. The DFO RV survey dataset represents the longest time series of species...

CMIST is a peer-reviewed screening-level risk assessment tool for marine invasive species (Drolet et al. 2016). It is a short questionnaire that follows the invasion process from arrival to impact and is designed so an informed assessor can evaluate one species in an assessment area in...

The Marine Biodiversity Observation Network Pole to Pole (MBON P2P) effort seeks to develop a framework for the collection, use and sharing of marine biodiversity data in a coordinated, standardized manner leveraging on existing infrastructure managed by the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS;...

The Marine Biodiversity Observation Network Pole to Pole (MBON P2P) effort seeks to develop a framework for the collection, use and sharing of marine biodiversity data in a coordinated, standardized manner leveraging on existing infrastructure managed by the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS;...

PURPOSE: From August 2nd to September 9th, 2013, Fisheries and Oceans Canada conducted a baseline survey of marine fishes and their habitats in the southern Canadian Beaufort Sea and Amundsen Gulf as part of the Beaufort Regional Environmental Assessment (BREA) called the Beaufort Sea Marine...

Graphic illustrations of the major ecosystems in the Pacific region, including details on the main ecological components, key ecological interactions, environmental drivers, and relevant human activities. Ecosystems range from the intertidal to the deep sea and include: High and low energy rocky...

The data in the files of this dataset represent the raw and standardized information of the distribution of the number of prey in stomachs of larval fish, the increments widths derived from larval fish, and the mortality rates, that were included in the study by Pepin (2024) into the probability...

PURPOSE: Determine the stock status of southern Gulf of St. Lawrence Atlantic Cod. DESCRIPTION: The yearly spawning stock biomass estimates of southern Gulf of St. Lawrence Atlantic Cod were obtained using a Statistical Catch-at-Age model as part of the stock assessment to year 2023. The...

11 tagged Blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) were tracked during the daytime movements as well as the feeding behaviour in the St. Lawrence River estuary. Kernel density was applied to derminate the high density feeding areas of all individuals combined (30, 40, 50, 60, 75, 95 %)....