The dataset incorporates information on Chinook salmon occurrences by basin in South America, which was obtained from the literature and from unpublished information obtained from research monitoring efforts conducted in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. The information was divided into two periods: historical (prior to 2006) and contemporary information (2006 onwards). Year or range of years in which the observation was taken was also included. This dataset was used to construct Fig. 1 of the manuscript "Contemporary distribution of non-native Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) in South America".

Adult Chinook salmon occurrences in South America were gathered from peer-reviewed journal articles and unpublished information obtained from research monitoring efforts conducted in Chile (Millennium Nucleus of Austral Invasive Salmonids, INVASAL), Argentina (CONICET), and Uruguay (National Direction of Aquatic Resources, DINARA, MGAP) between 2006 and 2022. For our literature review, we used the keywords “Oncorhynchus tshawytscha”, or “non-native Chinook salmon”, and “Distribution”, or “South America”, or “Patagonia”. Research monitoring programs included intense field sampling efforts in freshwater and estuarine environments (i.e., netting, angling, trolling, electrofishing, and environmental DNA), opportunistic and pilot sampling efforts in marine environments, as well as recreational fishery records with posterior field surveys or visual (photos or videos) confirmation.

For each Chinook salmon occurrence, we incorporated information about the name of the basin (location), its geographic location (latitude and longitude), the country or countries where the basin is located, the ocean where the basin discharge occurs (in the case of marine occurrences this corresponds to the site of the record) and the type of aquatic system (i.e., river mouth, coastal lagoon, freshwater, marine). In addition, we incorporated information about the type of record and the year of observation. Regarding the type of record, those occurrences prior to the year 2005 (Ciancio et al. 2005, Soto et al. 2007, Correa and Gross 2008) were classified as historical occurrences (H) and those that occurred between 2006 and 2022 were classified as contemporary occurrences (C). Contemporary distributions were classified based on the presence of ‘only adult salmon’ (i.e., no evidence of successful reproduction) or ‘adult spawners and juvenile salmon’ (i.e., evidence of successful reproduction). Finally, we provided a general characterization of each basin with Chinook salmon occurrences, including drainage area (in km²) and mean annual discharge (in m³ s^-1; based on WaterGAP 2.2). Coordinates for some data points were manually adjusted to avoid overlap in cartographic representations.

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