The Australian Zooplankton Biomass Database (1932 - 2019)

Zooplankton biomass data have been collected in Australian waters since the 1930s, yet most datasets have been unavailable to the research community. We have searched archives, contacted researchers, and scanned the primary and grey literature to collate this dataset (49067 records) of marine zooplankton biomass from waters around Australia, within the geographical extents of 0-60S, 110-160E. Many of these are small-scale datasets , but when combined, they provide over >85 years of large-scale zooplankton community biomass data for Australian waters from 1932 to the present. The data have been standardised, erroneous data removed, and all metadata included. The Australian Zooplankton Biomass Database will be valuable for global change studies, research assessing trophic linkages, and for initialising and assessing biogeochemical and ecosystem models of lower trophic levels.A snapshot of the Australian Zooplankton Biomass Database at the time of this publication has been assigned a DOI and will be maintained in perpetuity by the Australian Ocean Data Network (AODN). The ongoing version of this database will be freely available through the AODN Portal (http://portal.aodn.org.au/) in the near future. This metadata record was based on the following CSIRO metadata record: http://www.marlin.csiro.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/search?uuid=c3c9663f-50ba-41c9-b1ac-b5a9b7e9d4f7.