Groundfish Survey Invertebrate Data

The Irish Groundfish Surveys is part of an annual International Bottom Trawl Survey (IBTS) programme co-ordinated by the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES). The survey is carried out over 47 days between October-December each year by the Marine Institute and collects demersal trawl and ancillary data in Irish waters to produce relative abundance indices for fisheries management in the Northwest Atlantic Shelf waters.

In addition to the commercially exploited fish, elasmobranch, cephalopod and crustacean species, and an amount of macroinvertebrate species are also caught. These are sampled in a similar way to the groundfish, identified by species (or higher taxa where not practical to ID at sea), and total weight as well as counts are recorded where possible. An internal review of this data was undertaken in 2019 to check for spatial and temporal consistency in abundance and taxonomy with the standardised data set being made available here.