EMPA 2021 Fish

The overall goal of the Estuary Marine Protected Area (EMPA) Monitoring Program is to establish a monitoring framework, including data collection, analysis, synthesis, and reporting to determine the health of estuaries in California and the efficacy of MPA designation in estuaries. As part of the initial phases of the program, we developed standard protocols to assess key estuarine features across different estuaries, coupled with standard data templates and guidance on analysis, synthesis, and reporting, focused on four guiding principles: flexibility, comparability, interpretability, and practicality. We developed 14 SOPs and piloted the framework at 15 estuaries in 2021. For more details on the EMPA program and framework, see https://empa.sccwrp.org. This dataset includes both the fish abundance and length data from SOP 9. Fish abundance and length was collected by beach seining 3 to 5 times at each sampling station within an estuary. Each fish was identified to species and total abundance was reported by species. For length, the standard length of the first 10 fish of each species was measured. For more details, see SOP 9 on https://empa.sccwrp.org. To simplify data usability, fields from both data and metadata tables have been combined to provide the user with a merged dataset. The metadata table is also included in standalone format.