The data describes number of vessels, engine power, gross tonnage and fishing effort by year (1950-2017), targeted functional group, and fishing gear. Fishing effort estimates were derived from country-level fishing fleet capacity data publicly available, following the method described in Rousseau et al (2019; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1820344116) and methods improvement reported in Rousseau et al. (in prep). The data coverage is global, but estimates are given at the Exclusive Economic Zone-, Large Marine Ecosystem-, and Food Agriculture Organisation-level. The data was collected for a wide range of uses, including to inform global and regional marine ecosystem models and to understand the long-term evolution of fishing and its socio-ecological implications in the global ocean.

Five subsections of Antarctic ice cores were used to create a new methodology for analyzing microplastics in sea ice.

Latex balloons act like plastic in the ocean: they can travel far from their point of origin on atmospheric and water currents and float at the sea surface where they can be eaten by wildlife that mistake it for food. This study quantified the degradation behaviours of latex balloons in saltwater, freshwater, and industrial compost windrows over 16 weeks. The degradation of latex balloons was quantified with bi-weekly measurements of 1) changes in mass; 2) ultimate tensile strength; and 3) changes in surficial composition of balloons via attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR). This study tested whether degradation differed between two balloon colours (blue and white) and whether degradation differed between balloons whose packaging labels included the word "biodegradable" and balloons whose packaging did not contain the word "biodegradable", and were thus labeled as "traditional" balloons. Thus, these data consist of 1) mass measurements; 2) load-extension data used to determine ultimate tensile strength; and 3) ATR-FTIR spectra of latex balloons across the variables balloon type (biodegradable; traditional), colour (blue; white), and week sampled (0-16 weeks). Also included are measurements of balloons that did not undergo treatments and are either straight out of the package ("new") or balloons that were inflated but did not undergo any treatments ("inflated").