Trophic interaction data and taxonomic information for fish predators and their prey spanning the North East Atlantic and its marginal seas between 1836-2013

Taxonomic information and the diet matrix for fish species-size-classes (rows) and their prey (columns) used to produce feeding guilds via cluster analysis for Thompson et al. (2020) ‘A feeding guild indicator to assess environmental change impacts on marine ecosystem structure and functioning’. Journal of Applied Ecology. The purpose of this study was to propose a food web indicator which has been explicitly called for to inform policy via food web status assessment as part of the European Union’s Marine Strategy Framework Directive and the indicator toolkit supporting The Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic (the ‘OSPAR Convention'). We use fish stomach contents data from DAPSTOM (https://www.cefas.co.uk/data-and-publications/fish-stomach-records/) and ICES Year of the Stomach (https://ices.dk/data/data-portals/Pages/Fish-stomach.aspx). DAPSTOM is an ongoing initiative digitizing fish stomach records. The database contains information collected between 1836-2013 on 187 predator species (most occurring in northern European groundfish surveys). ICES Year of The Stomach Dataset contains records from 35 fish species between 1980-1991 sampled in the North Sea. Both datasets have information on predator-prey interactions for given sea areas and years. The new trophic interaction dataset presents binary information of interactions detected from across the North East Atlantic and its marginal seas, from 415,294 fish stomachs.