Marine trophic ecology data are in high demand as natural resource agencies increasingly adopt ecosystem-based management strategies that account for complex species interactions. Harbour seal (Phoca vitulina) diet data are of particular interest because the species is an abundant predator in the northeast Pacific Ocean and Salish Sea ecosystem that consumes Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.). A multi-agency effort was therefore undertaken to produce harbour seal diet data on an ecosystem scale using, 1) a standardized set of scat collection and analysis methods, and 2) a newly developed DNA metabarcoding diet analysis technique designed to identify prey species and quantify their relative proportions in seal diets. The DNA-based dataset described herein contains records from 4,625 harbour seal scats representing 52 haulout sites, 7 years, 12 calendar months, and a total of 11,641 prey identifications. Prey morphological hard parts analyses were conducted alongside, resulting in corresponding hard parts data for 92% of the scat DNA samples. A custom-built prey DNA sequence database containing 201 species (192 fishes, 9 cephalopods) is also provided.

Industry 4 (I4) was a revolutionary new stage for technological progress in manufacturing which promised a new level of interconnectedness between a diverse range of technologies. Sensors, as a point technology, play an important role in these developments, facilitating human–machine interaction and enabling data collection for system-level technologies. Concerns for human labour working in I4 environments (e.g., health and safety, data generation and extraction) are acknowledged by Industry 5 (I5), an update of I4 which promises greater attention to human–machine relations through a values-driven approach to collaboration and co-design. This article explores how engineering experts integrate values promoted by policy-makers into both their thinking about the human in their work and in their writing. This paper demonstrates a novel interdisciplinary approach in which an awareness of different disciplinary epistemic values associated with humans and work guides a systematic literature review and interpretive coding of practice-focussed engineering papers. Findings demonstrate evidence of an I5 human-centric approach: a high value for employees as “end-users” of innovative systems in manufacturing; and an increase in output addressing human activity in modelling and the technologies available to address this concern. However, epistemic publishing practices show that efforts to increase the effectiveness of manufacturing systems often neglect worker voice.