  Stellar tidal streams are a key tracer of galaxy evolution and have the
potential to provide an indirect means for tracing dark matter. For the Local
Group, many diffuse substructures have been identified and their link to galaxy
evolution has been traced. However, an analysis of a larger sample is required
to better probe the frequency and characteristics of these streams to verify
the predictions of the Lambda-CDM model and its implementation in cosmological
simulations. For that purpose, we are carrying out the first systematic survey
of faint stellar debris from tidally disrupted dwarf satellites around nearby
galaxies up to a distance of 100 Mpc. In this paper, we present a catalogue
with the results of the first harvest of stellar tidal streams found by visual
inspection in deep images of ~ 700 galaxies from the Dark Energy Survey (DES).
We include a photometric characterisation of the streams obtained by measuring
their surface brightnesses and colours. We found a total of 63 streams in our
sample at distances between 40 and 100 Mpc, including 59 which were not
previously reported. We measured their average surface brightness for the grz
bands, to be 28.35+/-0.20, 27.81+/-0.13 and 27.62+/-0.09 mag arcsec^-2,
respectively. By applying a statistical analysis to our findings, we obtained a
stream detection frequency of 9.1% +/- 1.1% , in agreement with previous
studies. We identified stream progenitors in 5-14% of our stream sample,
depending on the confidence level. The first catalogue of streams in the Local
Universe presented here will be complemented by future stream surveys within
the Stellar Stream Legacy Survey. In this work we have learnt that the faintest
measured stream surface brightness can be significantly brighter than the
surface brightness limit of an image measured at pixel level, mainly due to
correlated noise present in the images.
