ADEON AZFP Community Structure Dataset

One of the ADEON Ecological Modeling objectives was to describe how changes in abundance and distribution of the forage assemblage varies relative to warm and/or poor and cool and/or good productivity years off the US east coast. ADEON achieved long-term measurements of the presence of non-vocalizing marine life to record the abundance and community structure of fish and zooplankton. Single beam scientific echosounders were part of the network design at three sites; VAC, HAT, and JAX see https://adeon.unh.edu/landers .Species-specific community assemblage metrics were obtained, in part, from the acoustic zooplankton fish profilers (AZFPs) stationed at those sites. The multi-frequency echosounders were used to measure the presence of animals of different size classes. The echosounder transducers were positioned on the seabed looking upwards to image the full water column where the frequency attenuation permitted.Information from station net tows informed the 6 scattering categories (Non-Resonant Small, Non-Resonant Medium, Non-Resonant Large, Resonant Small, Resonant Large, and Unidentified. Echoview software was used to export Sv and NASC for each scattering group in hourly resolution to provide a measure of community structure for the ecological modeling effort.Please see the ADEON AZFP Community Structure Readme File_2021 stored with this dataset for more details on methodology and the dataset.