IMIS

The EAISSNA database contains information on location and time of spawning, and abundance and distribution of eggs and larvae of marine fish on the Scotian Shelf of North America. 197 scientific publications from 1919 to 2001 were reviewed and original analysis conducted on datasets from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) Scotian Shelf Ichthyoplankton Program (SSIP) and Fisheries Ecology Program (FEP) for 1976-82 from data archives, providing information on 107 taxa of fish and invertebrates. The database is intended for use in environmental assessment and management activities associated with offshore hydrocarbon development and production and ocean management. Supporting maps and database tables, and possible enhancements and developments including standards based World Wide Web (WWW) access are also described. Compact Disks (CD) (report, lists, maps and data) can be obtained from the authors.The database provides georeferenced information on distribution and seasonality of fish eggs and larvae, an important component of the ecosystem of the Canadian continental shelf. It is used by environmental managers, the oil industry and fisheries researchers. The database resides on the Fisheries and Oceans Canada Maritime Science Virtual Data Centre (VDC), which supports access and searches, as well as manipulation and visualization. The database includes new summary analyses of geospatial data from the Scotian Shelf Ichthyoplankton Program (SSIP) and Fisheries Ecology Program (FEP) and displays the information as electronic images (Microsoft portable network graphics format(PNGs) as well as vector representations (MapInfo Professional, MID/MIF transfer format). These data are for display on the OBIS portal and associated mapping programs and for download to personal computers for ad-hoc end-user analysis. OBIS Schema concepts present in this dataset include: DateLastModified, InstitutionCode, CollectionCode, CatalogNumber, ScientificName, Source, Citation, YearCollected, StartYearCollected, Ocean, Country, Locality, Longitude, StartLongitude, EndLongitude, Latitude, StartLatitude, EndLatitude, LifeStage, Notes.