This database contains ichthyoplankton data collected as part of the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) program and other cruises that were designed to assess the status coastal pelagic species and the California Current ecosystem from 1951 to present. The primary data are eggs and larvae captured in ring or bongo nets (oblique tows), Calvet or pairovet nets (vertical tows), and manta nets (surface tows).

This project establishes the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI), hosted at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), as a PACE validation program. Project Objectives are to: 1) collect a broad suite of biogeochemical and biological measurements on CalCOFI cruises for future use in developing, refining, and assessing advanced NASA data products; 2) co-locate in situ hyper- and multi-spectral measurements with the required validation measurement suite from CalCOFI stations; 3) Validate performance of in situ radiometry from the PACE observatory.

The CalCOFI Integrated Database: sixteen CalCOFI-program datasets (bottle, CTD, dissolved inorganic carbon, underway meteorology, ichthyoplankton, CUFES eggs, zooplankton, euphausiids, phyllosoma, phytoplankton, picoplankton, mesopelagic fish, seabirds and marine mammals, Dungeness crab megalopae) ingested into one schema and published as versioned Parquet releases on Google Cloud Storage. This record archives the pipeline repository at the release tag together with the release's catalog.json (every object's path, size and sha256), metadata.json and release notes; the Parquet objects themselves are on GCS and are verifiable through the catalog.The database is released under CC BY 4.0; each source dataset keeps its own license, recorded per dataset in the release's dataset table. The pipeline code in this repository is MIT-licensed (see LICENSE).Documentation: calcofi.io/db-schema; notebooks: calcofi.io/workflows.

Context

The CalCOFI data set represents the longest (1949-present) and most complete (more than 50,000 sampling stations) time series of oceanographic and larval fish data in the world. It includes abundance data on the larvae of over 250 species of fish; larval length frequency data and egg abundance data on key commercial species; and oceanographic and plankton data. The physical, chemical, and biological data collected at regular time and space intervals quickly became valuable for documenting climatic cycles in the California Current and a range of biological responses to them. CalCOFI research drew world attention to the biological response to the dramatic Pacific-warming event in 1957-58 and introduced the term “El Niño” into the scientific literature.

The California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) are a unique partnership of the California Department of Fish & Wildlife, NOAA Fisheries Service and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The organization was formed in 1949 to study the ecological aspects of the sardine population collapse off California. Today our focus has shifted to the study of the marine environment off the coast of California, the management of its living resources, and monitoring the indicators of El Nino and climate change. CalCOFI conducts quarterly cruises off southern & central California, collecting a suite of hydrographic and biological data on station and underway. Data collected at depths down to 500 m include: temperature, salinity, oxygen, phosphate, silicate, nitrate and nitrite, chlorophyll, transmissometer, PAR, C14 primary productivity, phytoplankton biodiversity, zooplankton biomass, and zooplankton biodiversity.

Content

Each table has several dozen columns. Please see this page for the table details.

The California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI)

Bottle data collected during CalCOFI cruises 1601, 1604, 1607, and 16011, January 2016 - November 2016. The California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) are a unique partnership of the California Department of Fish & Wildlife, NOAA Fisheries Service, and Scripps Institution of Oceanograhpy. The organization was formed in 1949 to study the ecological aspects of the sardine population collapse off California. Today our focus has shifted to the study of the marine environment off the coast of California, the management of its living resources, and monitoring the indicators of El Nino and climate change. CalCOFI conducts quarterly cruises off southern & central California, collecting a suite of hydrographic and biological data on station and underway.

Hydrographic bottle data including temperature, salinity, oxygen, nutrients, pigments, and C14 from CalCOFI cruises.

Bottle data collected during CalCOFI cruises 1203, 1207, 1210, and 1301, March 2012 - January 2013. The California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) are a unique partnership of the California Department of Fish & Wildlife, NOAA Fisheries Service and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The organization was formed in 1949 to study the ecological aspects of the sardine population collapse off California. Today our focus has shifted to the study of the marine environment off the coast of California, the management of its living resources, and monitoring the indicators of El Nino and climate change. CalCOFI conducts quarterly cruises off southern & central California, collecting a suite of hydrographic and biological data on station and underway.

Original provider: PRBO Conservation Science

Dataset credits: The projects were conducted under the grants awarded to the following organizations and their scientists.

The principle investigators of the CalCOFI part of this dataset are (in the chronological order from 1987 to 2006): Richard Veit and John McGowan, Scripps Institution of Oceanography (1987-1994) David Hyrenbach, Scripps Institution of Oceanography (1994-2000) Bill Sydeman, PRBO Conservation Science (2000-2006)

The principle investigators of the Rockfish part of this dataset is Bill Sydeman, PRBO Conservation Science (1996-2006)

the affiliations are the ones they belonged to at the time of the surveys.

The data were contributed by PRBO Conservation Science. These two projects are on going. See [Supplemental information] for the information on the PIs and organizations in recent years.

Abstract: This dataset contains observation data of marine birds and mammals from California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) from 1987-2006 and Rockfish cruises along the California coast from 1996-2006 by National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS).

Data were collected aboard research vessels using standardized marine bird and mammal survey techniques (Tasker et al. 1984, Buckland et al. 1993). Marine birds and mammals were observed in a 90-degree arc from the bow to one side of the ship out to 300m. Counts are summarized by species and behavior along the transects in 3 km bins. Data span years 1987 - 2006.

This collection includes data collected from multiple platforms in the coastal waters of California over many years, as part of the California Cooperative Fisheries Investigation (CalCOFI) project. CalCOFI has been observing the California Current since 1949 to understand and predict the effects of climate change on marine ecosystems.

This collection includes physical measurements and observations of temperature, conductivity, pressure, salinity, density, sound velocity, sigma-t, depth, humidity, photosynthetic active radiation (PAR), light transmission, turbidity, solids, water color, tide, current, sea, swell, wave, weather, wind, cloud, chemical measurements and observations of alkalinity, ammonia (NH3), ammonium (NH4), nitrate, nitrite, nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, pH, phosphate, phosphorus, polychlorinated biphenyls, silicate, urea, biological measurements and observations of chlorophyll, productivity, fluorescence, phaeophytin, phaeopigment, phytoplankton, zooplankton, as well as fishery surveys and other data.

CalCOFI (2026). CalCOFI Integrated Database, release v2026.10.05 [Data set]. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, NOAA Fisheries, and California Department of Fish and Wildlife. https://calcofi.io/db-schema/?v=v2026.10.05

This site contains hydrographic data from 1949-2002. It also has ongoing oceanographic, weather, abiotic and invertebrate (e.g. zooplankton) data and research projects details. Database can be downloaded and PUBLICATIONS link also has a search option to find results and data. Of the multiple ocean transects surveyed only one pertains to the central coast.

CalCOFI (2026). CalCOFI Integrated Database, release v2026.10.01 [Data set]. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, NOAA Fisheries, and California Department of Fish and Wildlife. https://calcofi.io/db-schema/?v=v2026.10.01

SIO Hydrographic data. See https://wp.calcofi.org/wp/sampling-info/methods/bottle-sampling-methods/

Dataset

This dataset was created by Linn Thant Soe Wai

Released under Apache 2.0

Contents

This dataset contains monthly descriptive statistics of Secchi disk depth collected within the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) program. The data correspond to stations located along CalCOFI Lines 80 and 90, two long-term transects in the California Current Ecosystem that have been sampled repeatedly as part of the CalCOFI survey. For each line-station combination and month, the dataset provides the start and end Julian day of the aggregation period and the minimum, maximum, mean, standard deviation, and median Secchi disk depth values. These statistics summarize water transparency observations and are intended for analyses of seasonal, interannual, and long-term environmental variability in the California Current Ecosystem. Variable Description SDay Start Julian day of the aggregation period EDay End Julian day of the aggregation period Min Minimum Secchi disk depth (m) Max Maximum Secchi disk depth (m) Mean Mean Secchi disk depth (m) StDev Standard deviation of Secchi disk depth (m) Median Median Secchi disk depth (m) Line CalCOFI sampling line (80 or 90) Year Calendar year Month Calendar month (1–12) Station CalCOFI station number ID Unique identifier combining line and station (e.g., 90.12)

Bottle data collected during CalCOFI cruises 1404, 1407, 1411, and 1501, March 2014 - February 2015. The California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) are a unique partnership of the California Department of Fish & Wildlife, NOAA Fisheries Service and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The organization was formed in 1949 to study the ecological aspects of the sardine population collapse off California. Today our focus has shifted to the study of the marine environment off the coast of California, the management of its living resources, and monitoring the indicators of El Nino and climate change. CalCOFI conducts quarterly cruises off southern & central California, collecting a suite of hydrographic and biological data on station and underway.

The data included in this dataset are bird and mammal observations from aboard research cruises. There are six tables of data: a transect log and observation log pairing for each of the three types of cruises. California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) cruises are conducted quarterly off the coast of southern and central California. National Marine Fisheries (NMFS) cruises are a part of the Rockfish Recruitment Survey off the coast of southern and central California. Data were also collected aboard North Pacific Continuous Plankton Recorder (NPCPR) cruises from June 2002 through May 2006. Observations of birds and mammals include both number and behavior in addition to temporal and spatial information recorded along the cruise transect. Data are collected in order to research the interdependent aspects of the marine environment, including the effects of natural and human based climate change, and the broad implications and influences of ocean currents, weather patterns, fishing practices and coastal development on marine food webs and ecosystem processes.

Species and behavior definitions for data codes are available in the "Supplemental Documents" section.

The fish larvae (ichthyoplankton) survey is conducted through the California Cooperative Fisheries Investigations program (CALCOFI, http://www.calcofi.org/). These data are a time series of fish larvae counts (or density, as number per 10 square meter of ocean surface) collected in the area of the California Current between San Diego and Avila Beach, California. Original data were filtered to facilitate consistent comparisons over time and space. The original CalCOFI fish larvae count data is available from the CoastWatch West Coast Regional Node (WCRN) at NOAA’s Pacific Fisheries Environmental Laboratory, http://coastwatch.pfeg.noaa.gov/erddap/tabledap/index.html. The dataset presented here is an aggregation of 31 data files, originally divided alphabetically by taxon (named “CalCOFI Larvae Counts, Scientific Names * to *”). The data were filtered to include only the 66 core stations with a maximum of 1 cruise per season. These 66 core stations have been most frequently sampled in the past and sampling is ongoing. CalCOFI sampling began in 1949. However, the dataset presented here begins in 1966 to include only samples that were analyzed with techniques that apply the most current and accurate identification of larvae to the species level. As the backlog of samples (i.e., before 1966) is re-examined, this dataset will be augmented with that additional, earlier data.

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This project establishes the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI), hosted at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), as a PACE validation program. Project Objectives are to: 1) collect a broad suite of biogeochemical and biological measurements on CalCOFI cruises for future use in developing, refining, and assessing advanced NASA data products; 2) co-locate in situ hyper- and multi-spectral measurements with the required validation measurement suite from CalCOFI stations; 3) Validate performance of in situ radiometry from the PACE observatory.