A dataset of zooplankton occurrence, abundance, and biomass in the Far East seas and adjacent Pacific Ocean waters

Planktonic animals drifting or floating in the sea have small body sizes and weights from hundreds to thousands of milligrams, and are primarily the food for other zooplankton and macrofauna: fish, cephalopods, seabirds and marine mammals, and also the larval pool of many benthic invertebrates. This paper describes a unique dataset of zooplankton collected from 1984 to 2013 in the North Pacific (the Bering Sea, Sea of Okhotsk, Sea of Japan and adjacent Pacific Ocean waters), one of the most productive and economically important regions of the world's oceans using a Juday net made of kapron sieve No. 49 (0.168 mm mesh) with a 0.1 m² opening. The information in this dataset has already been used to quantify the inventory of marine biological resources and assess the waters of the Russian Far Eastern seas and adjacent Pacific Ocean. In 2016, five tabular reference books were printed in Russian in limited numbers containing the species composition, occurrence (number and percentage of samples), abundance and biomass (in individuals per cubic meter, milligrams per cubic meter) of zooplankton in the surveyed area. The data are grouped by species, developmental stages, size fractions (animal length of 0.6–1.2 mm “fine/small,” 1.2–3.2 mm “medium” and >3.2 mm “large”), standard regions (their total area is more than 6 million km²), vertical layers of water, light and dark time of the day, four seasons of the year and multiyear periods, in which there were considerable changes in the biota of the region caused by global climate and oceanographic factors. This information has recently been verified, corrected, translated into English, transformed from text to digital format, and supplemented by GIS with maps of the standard regions by which data were aggregated using morphometric parameters (volume of water in cubic kilometers in the region, in its epipelagic 0–200 m, and upper epipelagic 0–50 m water layers, occupied area in square kilometers, longitude and latitude of their centroids in decimal degrees) to increase their availability to the scientific community worldwide. The data enable the evaluation of the total plankton stock of the Russian Far Eastern seas in the North Pacific (in trillions of specimens and thousands of tons), recalculate the volumetric characteristics of density into areal characteristics (in billions of specimens per square kilometer or tons per square kilometer), and, using previously published tables on calorific value and chemical composition of zooplankton, obtain their energy characteristics. Such data are crucial for the proper management of marine resources, aquaculture development, nature conservation, and the assessment of the anthropogenic impact on nature. The presented metadata provide a detailed description of how this unique dataset was created, sources and volume of gathered information, its benefits and drawbacks, some results on the quantitative inventory of marine biological resources and assessment of waters in the North Pacific, and future prospects for the use of this type of dataset in applied and fundamental research. There are no copyright restrictions on the data; please cite this data paper when the data are used in publications.