Species counts, depth and latitude from NOAA's annual groundfish trawl surveys (1999-2018) in the Northeast Pacific

These data are provided as Supporting Information to the article appearing
in Ecology Letters entitled: "Non-linear models of species’ responses
to environmental and spatial gradients". The article describes a
parametric framework for modelling species-environment non-linear
relationships, including an R package ('senlm'), available on
Github: https://primer-e.github.io/senlm. The framework has two
components: (i) a non-linear parametric mathematical function to model the
mean species response along a gradient that allows asymmetry,
flattening/peakedness or bimodality; and (ii) a statistical error
distribution tailored for ecological data types, allowing intrinsic
mean-variance relationships and zero-inflation. The article demonstrates
the utility of this model framework, highlighting the flexibility of a
range of possible mean functions and a broad range of potential error
distributions, in analyses of fish species’ abundances along a depth
gradient, and how they change over time and at different latitudes. A
vignette in R ('Vignette_S1.pdf') and associated R code
('Rcode_S1.txt') that utilise this dataset to demonstrate the
senlm modeling framework are available as Supporting Information to the
article.