Monterey Bay phytoplankton data from the Hopkins Marine Station CalCOFI program (1954-1968)

In 1951, the Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University became involved in the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) program to collect oceanographic data in and near Monterey Bay. Hopkins staff conducted weekly sampling (more or less) continuously from March 1951 through June 1974. Moss Landing Marine Laboratories (MLML) took over the Monterey Bay sampling program in July 1974, and it appears to have ended in 1979. The aim of the initial program was to conduct joint fisheries-oceanographic cruises that would help researchers understand what contributed to the crash of the California sardine fishery. The Hopkins Marine Station CalCOFI dataset is an extremely important contribution to early oceanographic research in the Northeast Pacific Ocean, and extends our observations in this area decades into the past. The raw and aggregated data for most of these cruises currently resides in the library at the Hopkins Marine Station.

This portion of the dataset is a transcription of the phytoplankton data that was collected from 1954 to 1968 (a subset of the full HMS CalCOFI program). These spreadsheets are the output of a crowdsourcing campaign on the 'From the Page' platform. We thank 58 contributors for transcribing over 1500 pages! See the dataset README file for detailed information about the data.