Plankton Production season off Portuguese coast from 1986 to 1987

The “Épocas de Postura da Sardinha” project aimed to obtain information on seasonal planktonic community abundance and diversity, contributing to the biological oceanography characterisation of the sardine reproduction season in Portugal.
The data presented refer to monthly sampling carried out between October 1986 to December 1987 in four transects off Portuguese shelf with RV \"Noruega\". The zooplankton sampling was carried out using a Bongo net - of 60 cm in diameter and 335 and 500 μm in mesh opening - in double oblique trawls, from around 5 meters up the bottom to the surface. The volume of filtered water was determined using a previously calibrated flowmeter.
This report is a repository of the identification and enumeration data of zooplankton samples. It is intended to contribute to the establishment of a zooplankton database for the Portuguese coast and make it accessible to interested users. In this sense, data processing is minimal, with care taken to control the quality of the data and to standardize the units in which the values are expressed.