Total organic carbon content of North Sea surface sediments

purpose: This map shows the total organic carbon content (TOC) of surface sediments in the North Sea. It was produced by interpolation of legacy data from more than 3000 samples collected between 1960 and 2014. The distribution of this map allows the user to visualize an important marine habitat characteristic and to exploit the dataset for ecological and biogeochemical modelling. abstract: Weight percent total organic carbon (TOC) is one of the most commonly used descriptors for marine sediments. It is used to judge primary productivity of the overlying water column and refers to the amount of organic matter preserved within sediment. TOC has a major influence on biogeochemical processes occurring in sediments, including the regulation of the behavior of the other chemical species such as metals and organic pollutants. Therefore, determination of TOC is an essential component of environmental characterization analysis.This map conveys information on the weight percent TOC of seabed sediments in the North Sea. It has been produced with multivariate geostatistics (external drift kriging) using the percentage mud content as a trend variable. The underlying data set is a compilation of over 3,000 sediment samples from many national and European surveys conducted between 1960 and 2014. Due to the vintage of some samples in the database, users are advised to consider the dynamic nature of the seafloor when using the data and when creating derived surrogate based habitat maps. Also, due to the diversity of sources for the point data, users should be aware of the differing methods by which the TOC analyses were conducted. As a consequence, map confidence is not necessarily uniform and thus areas not always comparable, even though the interpolation surface may look continuous.