In recent years considerable emphasis has been placed on finding
'ecosystem-based' approaches to fisheries management and multispecies models
are seen as crucial for addressing this new agenda. However, there are
currently, very few long-term datasets within the European context available
for parameterising such models.
DAPSTOM (Integrated Database and Portal for Fish Stomach Records) is an
ongoing initiative (supported by Defra and the EU) to digitize and make
available fish stomach content records spanning the past 100 years. The online
database contains information (over 225,000 records) on 188 predator species
(most of those occurring in northern European groundfish surveys) and can be
searched by predator name or by prey name for given sea areas and years. CSV
data files can be outputted containing all records from a particular query.
The current database contains information spanning 1893 - 2012.