Forage species such as Pacific sardine, northern anchovy, and market squid are critical ecological links between the planktonic food web and higher trophic levels in the California Current System, as well as supporting valuable fisheries. Environmental variability drives large fluctuations in their abundance and distribution. This dataset includes the outputs of Species Distribution Models (SDMs) for 6 key forage species, combining multiple survey datasets with environmental fields from a high-resolution Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) developed at the University of California - Santa Cruz, and the Copernicus-Globcolour interpolated surface chlorophyll product (https://doi.org/10.48670/moi-00100). The sardine and anchovy SDMs also included predictors indexing stock biomass (MacCall et al. 2016; Kuriyama et al. 2020). As temporally continuous salinity fields are not available from the UCSC ROMS, we included a measure of the distance to the nearest major river (mean > 50,000 CFS discharge) in the herring SDM, to capture to association of this species with estuaries.

The 6 species represented are Pacific sardine (Sardinops sagax), northern anchovy (Engraulis mordax), market squid (Doryteuthis opalescens), Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii), Pacific (chub) mackerel (Scomber japonicus), and Jack mackerel (Trachurus symmetricus). Results from two different SDMs are shown: Generalized Additive Models and Boosted Regression Trees, and both models predict the probability of occurrence of each species. We used data from the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center Coastal Pelagic Species and Columbia River Predator (Emmett et al. 2006) trawl surveys to train all SDMs, with the exception of market squid, where juvenile salmon survey data were used instead (see Chasco et al. 2022 for description of these data). More details on preliminary versions of the sardine and anchovy SDMs are available in Muhling et al. (2019). An additional manuscript in preparation will include description of up-to-date data, methods, and model structure. Until this is published, we strongly recommend contacting Barbara Muhling (Barbara.Muhling@noaa.gov) before working with this dataset, to ensure complete understanding of the details and caveats. Funding for this work was provided by NOAA Office of Sustainable Fisheries, and the NOAA Climate and Fisheries Adaptation program. References

Chasco, B. E., Hunsicker, M. E., Jacobson, K. C., Welch, O. T., Morgan, C. A., Muhling, B. A., & Harding, J. A. (2022). Evidence of Temperature-Driven Shifts in Market Squid Doryteuthis opalescens Densities and Distribution in the California Current Ecosystem. Marine and Coastal Fisheries, 14(1), e10190.

Emmett, R. L., Krutzikowsky, G. K., & Bentley, P. (2006). Abundance and distribution of pelagic piscivorous fishes in the Columbia River plume during spring/early summer 1998-2003: relationship to oceanographic conditions, forage fishes, and juvenile salmonids. Progress in Oceanography, 68(1), 1-26.

Kuriyama, P. T., Zwolinski, J. P., Hill, K. T., & Crone, P. R. (2020). Assessment of the Pacific sardine resource in 2020 for US management in 2020-2021. NOAA Technical Memorandum NOAA-TM-NMFS-SWFSC-628

MacCall, A. D., Sydeman, W. J., Davison, P. C., & Thayer, J. A. (2016). Recent collapse of northern anchovy biomass off California. Fisheries Research, 175, 87-94.

Muhling, B., Brodie, S., Snodgrass, O., Tommasi, D., Dewar, H., Childers, J., Jacox, M. Edwards, C. A., Xu, Y. & Snyder, S. (2019). Dynamic habitat use of albacore and their primary prey species in the California Current System. CalCOFI Reports 60: 1-15.