A dataset of zooplankton occurrence, abundance, and biomass in the Far East seas and adjacent Pacific Ocean waters.

Planktonic animals drifting or floating in the sea have small body size and weight from hundreds to thousands of milligrams, and are primarily the food for other zooplankton and macrofauna: fish, cephalopods, seabirds and marine mammals, and also the larval pool of many benthic invertebrates. The paper describes a unique dataset of zooplankton collected from 1984 to 2013 by the Juday net made of kapron sieve No. 49 (0.168 mm mesh) with a 0.1 m 2 opening in the North Pacific (the Bering Sea, Sea of Okhotsk, Sea of Japan and adjacent Pacific Ocean waters), one of the most productive and economically important regions of the world's oceans. The information in this dataset has already been used to quantify the inventory of marine biological resources and appraise the waters of the Russian Far Eastern seas and adjacent Pacific Ocean. In 2016, five tabular reference books were printed in Russian in limited number containing the species composition, occurrence (samples, %), abundance and biomass (ind./m 3 , mg/m 3 ) of zooplankton in the surveyed area. The data is aggregated by species, developmental stages, size fractions (animal length of 0.6-1.2 mm "fine/small", 1.2-3.2 mm "medium" and >3.2 mm "large"), standard regions (their total area is more than 6 million km 2 ), vertical layers of water, light and dark time of the day, four seasons of the year and multi-year periods, in which there were considerable changes in the biota of the region caused by global climate and oceanographic factors. This information has recently been verified, corrected, translated into English, transformed from text to digital format, and supplemented by GIS with maps of the standard regions by which data were aggregated using morphometric parameters (volume of water in km 3 in the region, in its epipelagic 0-200 m, and upper epipelagic 0-50 m water layers, occupied area in km 2 , longitude and latitude of their centroids in decimal degrees) to increase their availability to the scientific community worldwide. The data enable evaluation of the total plankton stock of the Russian Far Eastern seas in the North Pacific (in trillions of specimens and thousands of tons), recalculate the volumetric characteristics of density into areal characteristics (in billions of specimens/km 2 or t/km 2 ), and, using previously published tables on calorific value and chemical composition of zooplankton, obtain their energy characteristics. Such data are crucial for proper management of marine resources, aquaculture development, nature conservation, and assessment of anthropogenic impact on nature. Presented metadata provide detailed description of how this unique dataset was created, sources and volume of gathered information, its benefits and drawbacks, some results on quantitative inventory of marine biological resources and appraisal of waters in the North Pacific, and future prospects for the use of such dataset in applied and fundamental research. There are no copyright restrictions on the data; please cite this data paper when the data are used in publications.