Database of Marine Larval Fish Assemblages in Australian temperate and subtropical waters (1983 - 2016)

Larval fishes are a useful metric of marine ecosystem state and change, as well as species-specific patterns in phenology. The high level of taxonomic expertise required to identify larval fishes to species level, and the considerable effort required to collect them, make these data extremely valuable. Here we collate 3178 samples of larval fishes, from 12 research projects from 1983 to November 2016, from temperate and subtropical Australian waters. This forms a benchmark for the larval fish assemblage for the region, and includes recent monitoring of larval fishes at coastal oceanographic reference stations. Comparing larval fishes among projects can be problematic to due to differences in taxonomic resolution, and identifying all taxa to species can extremely challenging, so this study reports a standard taxonomic resolution (of 221 taxa) for this region to help guide future research. All data reported here has been expertly resolved to this taxonomic resolution.

The ongoing version of this larval fish database is freely available through the Australian Ocean Data Network Portal (AODN; https://portal.aodn.org.au/search?uuid=8e754b8b-c40f-4a21-ae82-573a67fc3556), and serves as a data repository for surveys of larval fish assemblages in the region.