The LENS Project: Transparent data for calculating the biomass of Gulf of Mexico aquatic resources

Accurate biomass estimates are critical for the management of coastal systems. Open-source data repositories fill a critical gap, allowing public entities to access resources that benefit their understanding of estuarine secondary production. Often, what limits the accuracy of fish and invertebrate biomass estimates is limited access of both public or published data, or if that available data is limited to a specific class or species assemblage. Typically, publicly available data are skewed towards including only the paired lengths and weights of larger individuals, since smaller individuals are difficult to identify, weigh, and measure. The goal of the Louisiana Estuarine Nekton Summary (LENS) Project is to provide a public repository of length-weight data to improve the accuracy of length-weight relationships and assist in estimating the biomass of estuarine nekton in the Gulf of Mexico. We compiled 8 datasets spanning across coastal Louisiana, including length-weight measurements for 39,951 individuals across 98 species sampled from 2002 to 2025. Length-weight relationships were analyzed using log-transformed linear models to generate species-specific relationships of growth to be used in estimating biomass and secondary production. Our compiled LENS dataset length-weight relationships represented a larger proportion of life histories across individual species than any other publicly available data collected in the Gulf of Mexico. This dataset will greatly benefit future work given the imperiled nature of estuarine habitats across the globe.