EMODnet Chemistry aims to provide access to marine chemistry data sets and derived data products concerning eutrophication, ocean acidification and contaminants. The chemicals chosen reflect importance to the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). This regional aggregated dataset contains all unrestricted EMODnet Chemistry data on contaminants, and covers the North Sea with 34978 CDI records divided per matrices: 1460 biota, 24740 water profiles, 6090 sediment profiles and 261 sediment time series. For water, the temporal range is from 1959-10-03 to 2019-12-30. For sediment, the temporal range is from 1970-07-11 to 2019-12-18 for profile data and from 1993-09-16 to 2015-06-15 for the time series. For biota, the temporal range is from 1979-02-26 to 2018-02-28. Data were aggregated and quality controlled by 'Aarhus University, Department of Bioscience, Marine Ecology Roskilde from Denmark'.

Regional datasets concerning contaminants are automatically harvested. Parameter names in these datasets are based on P01, BODC Parameter Usage Vocabulary, which is available at: https://vocab.seadatanet.org/p01-facet-search. Each measurement value has a quality flag indicator. The resulting data collections for each Sea Basin are harmonised, and the collections are quality controlled by EMODnet Chemistry Regional Leaders using ODV Software and following a common methodology for all Sea Regions.

Harmonisation means that: (1) unit conversion is carried out to express contaminant concentrations with a limited set of measurement units (according to EU directives 2013/39/UE; Comm. Dec. EU 2017/848) and (2) merging of variables described by different “local names” ,but corresponding exactly to the same concepts in BODC P01 vocabulary.

Detailed documentation is available at: https://doi.org/10.6092/8b52e8d7-dc92-4305-9337-7634a5cae3f4

Explore and extract data at: https://emodnet-chemistry.webodv.awi.de/contaminants%3ENorthSea

The harmonised dataset can also be downloaded as ODV spreadsheet (TXT file), which is composed of metadata header followed by tab separated values. This worksheet can be imported to ODV Software for visualisation (More information can be found at: https://www.seadatanet.org/Software/ODV ).

The same dataset is offered also as XLSX file in a long/vertical format, in which each P01 measurement is a record line. Additionally, there are a series of columns that split P01 terms in subcomponents (measure, substance, CAS number, matrix...).This transposed format is more adapted to worksheet applications users (e.g. LibreOffice Calc).

The original datasets can be searched and downloaded from EMODnet Chemistry Chemistry CDI Data and Discovery Access Service: https://emodnet-chemistry.maris.nl/search