Weight-to-weight conversion factors for benthic macrofauna: recent measurements from the Baltic and the North seas

[摘要] The availability of standardised biomass data is essentialfor studying population dynamics, energy flows, fisheries and food webinteractions. To make the estimates of biomass consistent, weight-to-weightconversion factors are often used, for example to translate more widelyavailable measurements of wet weights into required dry weights and ash-free dry weight metrics. However, for many species and groups thewidely applicable freely available conversion factors have until now remainedvery rough approximations with high degree of taxonomic generalisation. Toclose up this gap, here for the first time we publish the most detailed andstatically robust list of ratios of wet weight (WW), dry weight (DW) andash-free dry weight (AFDW). The dataset includes over 17 000 records ofsingle measurements for 497 taxa. Along with aggregated calculations,enclosed reference information with sampling dates and geographicalcoordinates the dataset provides a broad opportunity for reuse andrepurposing. It empowers the future user to do targeted sub-selections ofdata to best combine them with their own local data, instead of only having asingle value of conversion factor per region. The dataset can thereby beused to quantify natural variability and uncertainty. The dataset isavailable via an unrestricted repository from https://doi.org/10.12754/data-2021-0002-01 (Gogina et al., 2021).

[学科分类] 眼科学