Atlantic salmon post-smolt migration from Canadian rivers to the Labrador Sea: routes, timing, and influence of sea surface temperature

Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) populations are at historic lows and the
lack of specific knowledge regarding their marine migration routes limits
the ability to investigate factors contributing to mortality. In this
study, 3900 Atlantic salmon smolts from 32 rivers in eastern Canada were
acoustically tagged and tracked during their early marine migration over
three years (2021 to 2023). The dataset (master_dataset.csv) is the
dataset used for all analyses in this study. It contains initial detection
timestamps of Atlantic salmon smolts at acoustic receivers deployed within
ecoregions/quadrants, marine receiver lines and estuaries along the
eastern coast of Canada. These data were collected by by multiple projects
affiliated with the Ocean Tracking Network (see Table S2 for references to
the specific projects). In addition, the dataset contains the tagging
metadata for each Atlantic salmon smolt, such as the river they originated
from and morphological metrics. Lastly, the daily average Sea Surface
Temperatures (SST) in the top 6m of the water column at receiver locations
was assessed using an ocean circulation model configuration for the
Western North Atlantic (Nucleus for European Modelling of the Ocean (NEMO)
3.6 model). The daily SST data was merged to the detection database based
upon the horizontal mesh in closest proximity to each acoustic
receiver.