Tidal ranges on the French coasts of the Channel and the Atlantic for a coefficient of 95 : tidal range for mean neap tides for average atmospheric conditions..

Particularly suited to the purpose of measuring the sensitivity of benthic communities to trawling, a trawl disturbance indicator (de Juan and Demestre, 2012, de Juan et al. 2009) was proposed based on benthic species life history traits to evaluate the sensibility of mega- and epifaunal community to fishing pressure known to have a physical impact on the seafloor (such as dredging and bottom trawling). The selected biological traits were chosen as they determine vulnerability to trawling: mobility, fragility, position on substrata, average size and feeding mode that can easily be related to the fragility, recoverability and vulnerability ecological concepts. Life history traits of species have been defined from the BIOTIC database (MARLIN, 2014) and from information given by Le Pape et al. (2007), Brindamour et al. (2009) and Garcia (2010). For missing life history traits, additional information from literature has been considered. The five categories retained are life history functional traits that were selected based on the knowledge of the response of benthic taxa to trawling disturbance (de Juan and Demestre, 2012). They reflect respectively the possibility to avoid direct gear impact, to benefit from trawling for feeding, to escape gear, to get caught by the net and to resist trawling/dredging action, each of these characteristics being either advantageous or sensitive to trawling. Then, to allow quantitative analysis, a score was assigned to each category: from low vulnerability (0) to high vulnerability (3). The five categories scores were then summed for each taxon (the highly vulnerable taxon could reach the maximum score is 15) and this value may be considered as a species index of sensitivity to trawling disturbance. The scores of 812 taxa commonly found in bottom trawl by-catch in the southern North Sea, English Channel and north-western Mediterranean were described.

Combination of bathymetry, light, MPAs, Natura sites, seagrass distributions, Coralligenous formations, Mediterranean Cetaceans, Marine caves, Transitional water bodies

The development of the ecosystem approach and models for the management of ocean marine resources requires easy access to standard validated datasets of historical catch data for the main exploited species. They are used to measure the impact of biomass removal by fisheries and to evaluate the models skills, while the use of standard dataset facilitates models inter-comparison. North Atlantic albacore tuna is exploited all year round by longline and in summer and autumn by surface fisheries and fishery statistics compiled by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). Catch and effort with geographical coordinates at monthly spatial resolution of 1° or 5° squares were extracted for this species with a careful definition of fisheries and data screening. In total, thirteen fisheries were defined for the period 1956-2010, with fishing gears longline, troll, mid-water trawl and bait fishing. However, the spatialized catch effort data available in ICCAT database represent a fraction of the entire total catch. Length frequencies of catch were also extracted according to the definition of fisheries above for the period 1956-2010 with a quarterly temporal resolution and spatial resolutions varying from 1°x 1° to 10°x 20°. The resolution used to measure the fish also varies with size-bins of 1, 2 or 5 cm (Fork Length). The screening of data allowed detecting inconsistencies with a relatively large number of samples larger than 150 cm while all studies on the growth of albacore suggest that fish rarely grow up over 130 cm. Therefore, a threshold value of 130 cm has been arbitrarily fixed and all length frequency data above this value removed from the original data set.

Geographic information layer including the Transverse limit of the sea - mainland France, French Guiana, Martinique and Guadeloupe. This layer must be considered as an initial version to be validated locally by the competent services. Shom actively seeks out any information which could complete and improve the precision of this layer. The streams and rivers listed correspond to those mentioned in the applicable regulations and/or by a competent Government service. An inventory of existing legal and geographic information was drawn up prior to production in the form of an enquiry targeting services during the second half of 2014. The source legal text and a summary of digital conversion processes is available for each boundary proposed.Updated july 2018

The Joint WMO-IOC Technical Commission for Oceanography and Marine Meteorology Observing Programmes Support Centre, provides technical coordination at international level for the sustained elements of the Global Ocean Observing System. The Centre monitors in real-time the status of the observing networks and provides a toolbox to evaluate their performance and optimize their implementation and data flow. Currently OceanOPS monitors the Argo profiling floats, the DBCP surface drifters, coastal and tropical moorings, ice buoys, tsunami buoys, the OceanSITES moorings time-series, the GO-SHIP hydrographic reference lines, the SOT mat/ocean ship based observations and the GLOSS sea level tide gauges. A number of other observing systems are being added gradually, including ocean gliders, polar systems, marine mammals and potentially HF radars.

Pentadal (5-year average) resolution time-series of bottom temperature for North Atlantic ocean area deeper than 1000m. Calculate the 5 year average bottom temperature at each point on the grid and then calculate the area weighted average.

to deliver maps showing the extent of the trawling fishing grounds for identifying the areas which are most disturbed by bottom trawling and the changes in level of disturbance over the past ten years and identifying the gaps of fishing vessels’ tracking systems in the Mediterranean Sea