Fish abundance in the San Francisco Estuary (1959-2021), an integration of 9 monitoring surveys.

The San Francisco Estuary (SFE) is simultaneously a central hub of
water delivery in California and home to commercially important and
endangered fishes, such as Chinook Salmon, Green Sturgeon, and Delta
and Longfin Smelt. Extensive ecological monitoring has been
conducted for over 50 years, mainly under the auspices of the
Interagency Ecological Program for the San Francisco Estuary
(https://iep.ca.gov/). We integrated fish catch and length data from
9 long-term monitoring surveys in the SFE. The integrated database
contains survey-level data such as environmental variables and
sampling effort in addition to the fish-level species, lengths, and
counts. Zero catches have been filled in for any species not caught
in a sample. The geographic scope includes San Francisco Bay through
the upper estuary, and the timeseries spans 1959 to 2021. Sampling
methods, gear, fish length metric, and other factors differ among
the component surveys. Sampling designs (locations and temporal
frequency) have also changed over time. Thus, it is highly
recommended to inspect the documentation of the component surveys
for more information on their methods.