Numerous reef-forming species have declined dramatically over the last century. Many of these declines have been insufficiently documented due to anecdotal or hard-to-access information. The Ross worm Sabellaria spinulosa (L.) is a tube-building polychaete that can form large mostly subtidal reefs, providing important ecosystem services such as coastal protection and habitat provision. It ranges from Scotland to Morocco and into the Mediterranean as far as the Adriatic, yet little is known about its distribution outside of the North & Wadden Seas, where it is protected under the OSPAR & HELCOM regional sea conventions respectively. As a result, online marine biodiversity information systems currently contain haphazardly distributed records of S. spinulosa.

One of the objectives of the REEHAB project (http://www.honeycombworms.org) was to combine historical records with contemporary data to document changes in the distribution and abundance of the two Sabellaria species found in Europe, S. alveolata and S. spinulosa. Here we publish the result of the curation of 555 S. spinulosa sources, gathered from literature, targeted surveys, local conservation reports, museum specimens, personal communications by authors  their research teams, national biodiversity information systems (i.e. the UK National Biodiversity Network (NBN), www.nbn.org.uk) and validated citizen science observations (i.e. https://www.inaturalist.org ). 56% of these records were not previously referenced in any online information system. Additionally, historic samples from Gustave Gilson were scanned for S. spinulosa information and manually entered.  

The original taxonomic identification of the 40,261 S. spinulosa records has been kept. Some identification errors may however be present, particularly in the English Channel and Mediterranean where intertidal and shallow subtidal records can be mistaken for Sabellaria alveolata. A further 229 observations (16 sources) are recorded as ‘Sabellaria spp.’ as the available information did not provide an identification down to species level. Many sources reported abundances based on the semi-quantitative SACFOR scale whilst others simply noted its presence, and others still verified both its absence and presence. The result is a curated and comprehensive dataset spanning over two centuries on the past and present global distribution and abundance of S. spinulosa.

Sabellaria spinulosa records projected onto a 50km grid. When SACFOR scale abundance scores were given to occurrence records, the highest abundance value per grid cell was retained.