Marine Invertebrate assemblages in southern California

This is a point file of invertebrate site clusters calculated from benthic trawls completed by the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project (SCCWRP). Data from 426 fisheries independent trawls ranging from 2-215 meters depth were collected during the months of June-August. The data set contained information for 288 invertebrate species in 426 trawls, but removal of rare species resulted in 41 species in 401 trawls analyzed for assemblage structure. Gear included a 7.6-m head-rope semi balloon otter trawl with 1.25 cm codend mesh trawled for 5-10 minutes at each station. For more information on trawl methods, see Allen et al. (1997), and Allen et al. (2003). Site groups were calculated using the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity coefficient with average means clustering (Romesburg, 1991). Invertebrates that were not present in at least 5% of the trawls were removed from this analysis.