1870 - 1883 Centre for Environment, Fisheries & Aquaculture Science (Cefas) Digitised Fish Spawning Distribution Adapted from the Olsen 1883 Piscitorial Atlas

The dataset is a collection of Geographic Information System (GIS) shapefiles showing the general distribution and spawning distribution of 14 fish species selected from the 46 maps in the Olsen atlas based on their relevance to the present day spawning datasets and commercial relevance: cod, haddock, herring, lemon sole, mackerel, plaice, sole, whiting, skate, thornback ray, ling, horse mackerel, hake and sprat (general distribution only). The majority of the Olsen (1883) maps were for species either no longer considered in a large commercial capacity in UK waters (e.g. anchovy, garfish, tusk etc.) and/or had no comparative present day dataset available (e.g. mussels, turbot etc.). The data complements the present day fish spawning datasets - Coull et al 1998, Ellis et al 2012 and Marine Scotland 2014.