#MSFD Quality Assured Groundfish Survey Monitoring and Assessment Data Products
This is a pilot project which aims to produce quality assured Groundfish Survey Monitoring and Assessment data products (GFSM&A DP) for use in the derivation of indicators for assessing Good Environmental Status for the Marine Strategy Framework Directive. Quality Assurance documentation is currently being compiled along with the coding uploaded here which aims to produce a quality assured dataset for use in MSFD assessment. National data providers have been instrumental in bringing the DATRAS database closer to the national standard datasets through uploading their corrected data to the DATRAS database. Changes such as correcting species codes, correcting length records, and correcting distance records to match the national data base entries, were made. There are two separate steps in the quality control procedure. (a) Data is checked at the national institution with the original data (as far as possible), then corrected and re-uploaded to DATRAS. By checking this existing data genuine mistakes have been identified. (b) In some cases for a variety of reasons it isn’t possible to check the original data. In these cases the second step is applied, this is when in individual cases where direct comparisons of historic data are impossible, but expert judgement is needed to achieve consistency and plausibility throughout the data set. When a reported data point are considered to be highly unlikely, for example a Sprattus sprattus of 28cm when the reported Lmax is 16cm, the expert judgement from the data provider in question was that this is a typo, where the 3 letter code for Spotted Ray (SDR) was mistyped as the one for sprat (SPR). This error was picked up by screening the Lmax for every species. Many of these changes have already been made in the DATRAS database, but issues arose with uploading historic data for many of the institutions and some resubmissions of historical data have yet to be completed. When all of the corrected data has been compiled the next step is estimating missing values in the haul chronology and biological datasets. This is completed using a variety of methods detailed in the MSFD Quality Assurance GFSM&A DP documentation, which relevant ICES working groups have been asked to provide feedback on.
#Development This project is at stage one in development, the documentation, coding and first version of the datasets are currently being compiled.
#Documentation The documentation to support this project is currently in review with ICES working groups. A link to the table of contents will be provided here when it is finalised. This documentation will be bundled with the project, to make it readily available for offline reading and will provide a useful starting point for any analyses you intend to use the products or codes provided here.
#Contributing The ICES community is currently involved in this project, but should you have comments or would like to be involoved please contact me [M.Moriarty@marlab.ac.uk].
#Acknowledgements This work was undertaken as part of a major initiative to develop a data product for MSFD assessment purposes. We gratefully acknowledge the contributions from all members of WGMSFDDemo, WGBEAM, WGIBTS, COBAM fish tech group and the ICES data center over the course of many meetings, both formal and informal. We are grateful to everyone who gave their time and knowledge so willingly.