Harbour seal DNA metabarcoding diet data of the Salish Sea

Marine trophic ecology data are increasingly in demand as natural resource agencies adopt ecosystem-based management strategies that account for multiple species interactions. Harbour seal (Phoca vitulina) diet data are of particular interest because the species is an abundant predator in the northeast Pacific Ocean and the Salish Sea ecosystem (inland waters of British Columbia, Canada, and Washington, USA) that feeds on Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.). A multi-agency effort was therefore undertaken to produce harbour seal diet data at the ecosystem scale using 1) a standardized set of scat collection and analysis methods, and 2) a newly developed DNA metabarcoding diet analysis technique capable of identifying prey species and quantifying their relative DNA proportions (i.e. relative read abundance) in seal diets. The .csv dataset described in the data descriptor manuscript contains records from 4,625 harbour seal scats representing 52 haulout sites, 7 years, 12 calendar months, and a total of 11,641 prey identifications. These are the raw sequencing data produced from the project in .fastq format. Please refer to the data descriptor for access to the QIIME 1 mapping files and additional metadata.