Bottom trawl groundfish surveys and spatio-temporal model settings, Eastern Bering Sea, 1982 - 2019 in the months of May to August

The data used for this project is the raw data collected during annual bottom trawl surveys of the eastern Bering Sea done by the Groundfish Assessment program. This bottom trawl survey is conducted on an annual basis in the time frame of late May to mid-August. At each predetermined station, a 30-minute bottom trawl is conducted. Net mensuration data is collected from net sensors placed on the wingtips and headrope of the fishing net to collect net width and net height during the trawl. A seabird CTD is attached to the headrope to collect depth, time, and temperature during each haul.
At each station, biological data (all living organisms except for vegetative materials) are counted or weighed or both and recorded. Species are coded to the lowest taxonomic group possible. Data exists in 2 .csv files. The catch file has the biological data collected in each haul. The biological data includes a line for each species encountered as well as the total weight in aggregate of the species and the total number of that species for a particular haul. The haul file has the instrument data, position, time, depth data used to position catch data in time and space.
The surveys were conducted annually from 1982 to 2019 for the southern eastern Bering Sea (approximately south of St. Matthew island) and infrequently for the northern Bering Sea (approximately from north of St. Mathew Island to the Bering Strait.

This dataset also contains model settings for three implementations of the Vector Autoregressive Spatio-Temporal (VAST) model using the R package. The modeling work and its findings are described in "1805_Final report.pdf" and use the bottom trawl groundfish survey data as inputs. The files are text files and R code files.

This dataset was generated under NPRB project 1805.