Gelatinous zooplankton community data collected from in situ imaging during RV METEOR cruise M182 in the eastern tropical North Atlantic in 2022@en

We present a dataset on gelatinous zooplankton community data (counts, abundance, carbon mass) obtained from in situ imaging during the RV METEOR campaign M182 in the eastern tropical North Atlantic (Cabo Verde and Mauritania) in 2022. We deployed a stereocamera configuration (using the Ximea MX245CG-SY-X2G2-FL unit featuring 24.5 MP Sony IMX540 sensors and DUW Distagon deep ocean metric 4.2 mm f4 lenses) on the horizontally towed multi-sensor platform XOFOS. We performed towed horizontal transects of 13-15 min at distinct depths between 0 and 1100 m water depth. The stereo footage was annotated using the video and annotation reference system (VARS) from Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (Schlining and Stout, 2006). The carbon mass was calculated from size measurements from Wendt et al. (in preparation), which were used for biovolume calculation. From biovolume, we calculated the carbon mass for each taxon using the same density as the surrounding water and carbon mass to wet weight ratios from McConville et al. (2017).