EMODnet Chemistry aims to provide access to marine chemistry data sets and derived data products concerning eutrophication, ocean acidification and contaminants. The chemicals chosen reflect importance to the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). This regional aggregated dataset contains all unrestricted EMODnet Chemistry data on contaminants; temperature, salinity and additional sampling parameters are included when available. The spatial coverage is the Mediterranean Sea with 10917 CDI records divided per matrices: 3095 water profiles and 1385 water timeseries, 1511 sediment profiles and 4083 sediment timeseries, 42 biota profiles and 801 biota timeseries. In the water datasets, the vertical profiles temporal range is from 1974-09-12 to 2015-12-11 and the timeseries temporal range is from 2006-08-17 to 2018-04-26. In the sediment datasets, vertical profiles temporal range is from 1971-01-12 to 2016-04-07 and time series temporal range is from 1981-06-27 to 2018-12-14. For the biota datasets, vertical profiles temporal range is from 2008-05-05 to 2013-05-22 and time series temporal range is from 1979-03-29 to 2017-03-15. Data were harmonised and quality controlled by ‘Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, Hellenic National Oceanographic Data Centre (HCMR/HNODC)’ from Greece.

Regional datasets concerning contaminants are automatically harvested. Parameter names in these datasets are based on P01, BODC Parameter Usage Vocabulary, which is available at: https://vocab.seadatanet.org/p01-facet-search. Each measurement value has a quality flag indicator. The resulting data collections for each Sea Basin are harmonised, and the collections are quality controlled by EMODnet Chemistry Regional Leaders using ODV Software and following a common methodology for all Sea Regions.

Harmonisation means that: (1) unit conversion is carried out to express contaminant concentrations with a limited set of measurement units (according to EU directives 2013/39/UE; Comm. Dec. EU 2017/848) and (2) merging of variables described by different “local names” ,but corresponding exactly to the same concepts in BODC P01 vocabulary.

Detailed documentation is available at: https://doi.org/10.6092/8b52e8d7-dc92-4305-9337-7634a5cae3f4

Explore and extract data at: https://emodnet-chemistry.webodv.awi.de/contaminants%3EMediterranean

The harmonised dataset can also be downloaded as ODV spreadsheet (TXT file), which is composed of metadata header followed by tab separated values. This worksheet can be imported to ODV Software for visualisation (More information can be found at: https://www.seadatanet.org/Software/ODV ).

The same dataset is offered also as TXT file in a long/vertical format, in which each P01 measurement is a record line. Additionally, there are a series of columns that split P01 terms in subcomponents (measure, substance, CAS number, matrix...).This transposed format is more adapted to worksheet applications users (e.g. LibreOffice Calc).

The original datasets can be searched and downloaded from EMODnet Chemistry Chemistry CDI Data and Discovery Access Service: https://emodnet-chemistry.maris.nl/search