Stephen J. Romaine and Robin M. Brown
The Canadian GLOBEC project was
funded for the period from 1997 to 2000, with project components in both the
North Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans.
Over 30 research missions were conducted in the Pacific Region by both
Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) and universities in support of the GLOBEC
program. Much of the CTD and physical
data resides at the Institute of Ocean Sciences plus smaller DFO databases hold
both zooplankton and fish data. Other
data types, including the modelled data, reside in various formats and
conditions either at DFO institutions or universities. Some of these data are readily accessible to
the public; whereas others are partially processed and reside with Principal
Investigator.
An
electronic inventory will outline the current status of Canadian GLOBEC data
collected in the North Pacific.
Metadata will include: research
mission and vessel used, survey areas, PI’s, dates, data types collected, the
current storage location for the data, and the current status of the data. This meta-database will be searchable for
various data types, Principal Investigator, date ranges, or data status. The meta-database will also identify any
shortfalls in data structure or data that are subject to being lost or damaged
since they are located in inadequate storage locations.
11AM2002 W3-338 Oral
NEKTON, ZOOPLANKTON, ZOOBENTHOS AND TROPHIC LEVELS’ BIOPRODUCTIVITY DATABASES FOR THE NORTH PACIFIC
Elena Dulepova and Igor Volvenko
Pacific Fisheries Research Centre (TINRO-Centre), 4
Shevchenko Alley, Vladivostok, 690950, Russia
tinro@tinro.ru
At the Pacific Fisheries Research Centre, for the
period from 1979 to 2002 data on nekton and nektobenthos were collected for the
Okhotsk, Bering, Japan Seas and some other regions of the North Pacific. Data include the numbers of research
expeditions, the vessels, co-ordinates of samplings, dates and the registration
forms. Besides, for the period from
1984 to 2002, data are available on biomass and productivity predatory and unpredatory
zooplankton and zoobenthos for the different regions of Bering and Okhotsk
Seas. Some of these data were already
digitized and accessible to the TINRO research fellows at request. The rest is not accessible since in a paper
form resides with the Principal Investigators.
11AM2002 W3-334 Oral
US GLOBEC DATA MANAGEMENT
Robert C. Groman
Good data management is an important component of a
successful multi-year, data intensive program like US GLOBEC. Data management combines efforts in
acquisition, quality control, storage design and retrieval philosophy to
support the analysis and synthesis goals of the scientific investigators.
The US
GLOBEC program consists of three modules:
Georges Bank, Northeast Pacific and Southern Ocean. Each module has from 45 to 70 scientific
investigators, laboratory and field work, modeling efforts, retrospective
analysis, and synthesis activities. It
is important that the results of these efforts be made available to other researchers
within the program in a timely basis, and indeed that has been one of the
primary goals of the data management office.
This has aided chief scientists in planning their cruises and to make
last minute changes in their ships' tracks based on the results and input from
previous cruises.
Like many
other programs, we take advantage of the Internet to allow researchers in
various locations, using various different computing platforms, to access the
program's data. Any standard browser,
such as Internet Explorer and Netscape, can access our web site at
http://globec.whoi.edu/ and follow the links to the on-line data sets. These data are served using the US JGOFS
software, developed several years ago to address the US JGOFS data management
needs. We have used the same software
to provide both distributed data serving and distributed data access. Web users can download listings, plots, and
the data files themselves to their own computers following the guidelines of
our Data Acknowledgment Policy.
11AM2002 W3-223 Oral/Poster
Todd
D. O’Brien
Ocean Climate Laboratory, E/OC5, National
Oceanographic Data Center, 1315 East-West Hwy., SSMC-III, Room 4340, E/OC5,
Silver Spring, MD 21044, U.S.A. Todd.OBrien@noaa.gov
The Ocean Climate Laboratory (OCL), a
research and products division of the U.S. National Oceanographic Data
Center, is building an archive of globally distributed historical plankton
measurements and associated metadata.
As part of the World Ocean Database, these plankton data are
stored with all available, co-located temperature, salinity, nutrient, and
chlorophyll data. The World Ocean
Database 2001 contains over 2.1 million globally-distributed Ocean Station
Data (OSD) casts, sampled from the early 1800s to the present. Of these stations, over 98,000 contain
measurements of plankton biomass (e.g. total mass or total volume), and
over 100,000 contain taxonomic measurements (e.g. counts of individual species
and/or life stages).
The OCL
collaborates with international scientists and institutions, and participates
in an active international program (the IOC Global Oceanographic Data Archeology and Rescue (GODAR)
project) to identify and/or digitize historical plankton and profile data for
inclusion into the database. As work
continues to expand the database, attention is being focused on improving
quality control techniques, comparing data from different sampling techniques,
and creating gridded fields of annual and seasonal mean plankton biomass and
abundance.
Multi-variable
integrated databases such as the World Ocean Database are useful for a variety
of research applications (e.g., studies on biological/physical interaction,
climate change, decadal variability, biogeography and biodiversity). These data are distributed on CD-ROM as part
of the World
Ocean Database 2001, and are available online at www.nodc.noaa.gov.
METADATA INVENTORY OF BIOLOGICAL DATA COLLECTED BY RUSSIAN FISHERIES RESEARCH INSTITUTES
Igor Shevchenko, Victoria Khan, Lilia
Miromanova and Georgiy Moiseenko
Pacific
Fisheries Research Centre (TINRO-Centre), 4 Shevchenko Alley, Vladivostok,
690950, Russia igor@tinro.ru
For the period from 1999 to 2002
the Fisheries Committee of Russia has been funding a project on implementation
and maintenance of a metadata inventory of biological data collected by Russian
fisheries research institutes. Metadata
includes the numbers of research expeditions, the vessels, co-ordinates and
regions of samplings, dates, registration forms, current storage location. Accounted are data that already digitized
and stored in the computerized databases.
Covered are the periods beginning from the foundations of institutes and
all regions visited by the Russian research vessels including the North
Pacific. The contents are updated once
a year.
The
inventory is searchable through the Internet at http://metadata.tinro.ru. Authorized users may even send queries using
SQL.
HYDROBIOLOGICAL DATA COLLECTED AT TINRO-CENTER IN THE NORTH PACIFIC
Anatoly F.Volkov, Valery I.Chuchukalo
and Victor A. Nadtochy
Pacific Scientific Research Fisheries Center
(TINRO-Center), 4 Shevchenko Alley, Vladivostok, 690950, Russia vaf413@tinro.ru
At Laboratory of Hydrobiology of TINRO-Center, there
are three main directions of research:
planktonic communities, benthic communities and feed chains of mass food
fishes and invertebrates. The area covered
by the research includes the Russian Far Eastern Marginal Seas and Kuril-Kamchatka
zone.
The following aspects are mainly
studied: structure of planktonic communities of epipelagial (a layer of 200-0
m), seasonal and interannual dynamics, formation of productive zones; a
plankton, as a food base of nektonic animals, structure and interannual
dynamics of benthic communities, security food and its influence on structure
of planktonic and ground communities.
The data are collected annually
during scientific expeditions undertaken according to the complex research
programs of TINRO-Center since 1984. In total, it was made more than 50
cruises. The main part of the collected
data are usually processed during the cruises.
The data are stored at the laboratory both in electronic(60%) and paper
(40%) forms.
DATA MANAGEMENT FOR UK GLOBEC
AND THE MARINE PRODUCTIVITY THEMATIC
Phil Williamson1 and
Gwenaëlle Moncoiffé2
1 School of Environmental Sciences, Univ of East Anglia,
Norwich, NR4 7TJ, United Kingdom
p.williamson@uea.ac.uk
2 British Oceanographic Data Centre, Bidston Hill, Prenton,
CH43 7RA, United Kingdom
gmon@bodc.ac.uk
UK GLOBEC activities are of two
kinds: 1) the Marine Productivity (MarProd) thematic with component studies on
North Atlantic zooplankton, funded as a 5 yr programme by the Natural
Environment Research Council; and 2) work of a more diverse nature, including
Southern Ocean studies (primarily by the British Antarctic Survey), research on
commercially-exploited species (primarily by fishery laboratories), plankton
monitoring (by SAHFOS and others) and participation in EU-funded
programmes. Research leaders for
projects in both groups are encouraged to provide basic information, via DIF
entries, to the GLOBEC IPO. More than
40 have done so to date, providing basic information on data management and
data access arrangements. For the
MarProd thematic, additional data management structures have been developed to
maximise the long-term scientific and societal benefits from the programme. Thus the British Oceanographic Data Centre
(BODC), hosted by the NERC Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, interacts with
MarProd in the following ways:
· close involvement in fieldwork planning, formulation of
data policy and protocols, and other aspects of programme development, working
with the Steering Committee and individual scientists
· maintaining a data-tracking system and assembling data
into an integrated database, checking on data quality and supporting
documentation
· providing information services, supervising data
access arrangements and publishing data collations, for users within and
outside the programme.
There has
been good progress to date in the transfer to BODC of datasets collected on
MarProd research cruises in the northern North Atlantic. For example: 45%
completion for Discovery 258 (Nov-Dec 2001), and 26% completion for Discovery
262 (April-May 2002). The programme
data policy is available from www.bodc.ac.uk (using 'projects' and 'current
projects' links), together with the Discovery 258 cruise report, a dataset
inventory and banking status information.
GLOBEC DATA MANAGEMENT
Hester Willson
GLOBEC International Project Office, Plymouth Environmental
Research Centre (PERC), Plymouth Marine Laboratory, Prospect Place, Plymouth,
PL1 3DH, United Kingdom hew@pml.ac.uk
The GLOBEC International Project Office was formed
in early Autumn 1999. I was appointed
data manager in December 1999. The
first task I undertook as GLOBEC data manager was to collate all the
information on GLOBEC’s National, Multi-national and Regional Programmes. This information was published as GLOBEC
Special Contribution No. 4 and distributed amongst the GLOBEC community.
In May
2001, the GLOBEC Metadata portal was launched, hosted by NASA’s Global Change
Master Directory. Since that time I
have spent a lot of time writing the metadata entries to populate the portal
(over 100). In the last few months, a
few authors other than myself have started adding DIFs to the GLOBEC metadata
portal
Data
Management for the GLOBEC programme has been made more difficult by the fact
that the data management started long after the programme had begun. Combining existing data management systems
with new metadata systems has been difficult and some programmes had finished
before the data management efforts had begun.
Despite a
good website and an increasingly successful newsletter, it has been difficult
to encourage active support for data initiatives among GLOBEC scientists. Although communication with GLOBEC National
and Regional representatives is generally good, it has been difficult to reach
the majority of GLOBEC scientists as information does not appear to ‘filter
through’ well
In
conclusion, data management is not ‘sexy science’ so often is at the very
bottom of the average scientist’s priorities.
Things are changing but progress is slow.
Archives of Plankton Dataset in Japan
Toru Suzuki and Sachiko Oguma
Marine Information Research Center, Japan Hydrographic Association
Mishima Bldg. 5F, 7-15-4, Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-0061, Japan suzuki@mirc.jha.jp
There are two datasets of plankton biomass observed by Japanese
Institutions. Zooplankton biomass dataset, also known as K.Odate
Collection, is long-term wet-weight data in the western North Pacific Ocean
at 150m depth from 1951 to 1999. These observed data were maintained by Dr.
K. Odate of Tohoku National Fisheries Research Institute, Japan Fisheries
Agency, and finally was submitted by Marine Information Research
Center(MIRC) and Japan Oceanographic Data Center(JODC). The dataset is
distributed by CD-ROM included some document and figures and as a part of
World Ocean Database 2001. Hokkaido National Fisheries Research Institute,
Japan Fisheries Research Agency, has monitored characteristics of Oyashio
water at the stations off Hokkaido called A-LINE since 1988, and
distributes oceanographic, chemical and dry-weight plankton data through
the Web. The historical marine organisms data, mainly plankton, is
distributed by JODC Data Online Service System with taxonomic codes th!
at is updated in 2002. The data and inventory will be submitted and merged
to JODC database after the projects of Japan GOBEC finished.