AFSC/ABL: Nearshore Fish Atlas of Alaska

NOAA Fisheries Alaska Regional Office and Alaska Fisheries Science Center’s Auke Bay Laboratories designed the Nearshore Fish Atlas of Alaska (NFA) to provide access to available data on the distribution, relative abundance, and habitat use of nearshore fishes in Alaska. The NFA is a spatially explicit, unified database of numerous nearshore catch datasets collected by various agencies and organizations in Alaska over the past several decades. The compiled datasets are from dozens of studies with different objectives and gear types (e.g., beach seines, purse seines, and trawls). The online NFA application has spatial and tabular tools for extensive searching, filtering, and downloading fully attributed data.

The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1996 requires the identification of essential fish habitat (EFH) for species included in federal fishery management plans (FMPs). Identifying EFH requires basic information on fish distribution and habitat use. For many FMPs in Alaska, EFH information is limited, especially for early life stages of fish found in nearshore habitats. A key function of the NFA is to provide a centralized location for researchers and the public to conduct desktop reconnaissance and acquire a wealth of data. Ultimately, the information housed in the NFA helps resource managers prepare biological opinions and identify habitats essential to different life stages of commercially and ecologically important fish species in Alaska’s nearshore.

Loaded by FGDC Metadata Uploader, batch 7175, 10-05-2015 14:28

The following FGDC sections are not currently supported in InPort, but were preserved and will be included in the FGDC export:

- Taxonomy (FGDC:taxonomy)

The user is responsible for the results of any application of this data for other than its intended purpose.

N/A

There are no legal restrictions on access to the data. They reside in public domain and can be freely distributed.

User must read and fully comprehend the metadata prior to use. Data should not be used beyond the limits of the source scale. Acknowledgement of NOAA, as the source from which these data were obtained, in any publications and/or other representations of these data is suggested.

Microsoft Access database

None

Location of Fish Atlas lexicon is RECA datasets page

Contact the dataset POC for full QA/QC methodology.

no delay

NCEI site yet to be determined

IT Security and Contingency Plan for the system establishes procedures and applies to the functions, operations, and resources necessary to recover and restore data as hosted in the Western Regional Support Center in Seattle, Washington, following a disruption.

Contact Data Steward for dataset lexicaon and full methodology.