Realm: Marine
Climate: Temperate/Tropical
Biome: Multiple ecoregions
Central latitude: -23.830553
Central longitude: 136.449216
Duration: 49 years, from 1938 to 2014

80764 records

639 distinct species

Across the time series Chaetognatha is the most frequently occurring species

Methods

Here we have compiled all available data on the abundance of marine zooplankton species in Australia from multiple sources including IMOS research publications unpublished reports private databases and student theses. The compiled data set has 98676 records from 38 projects and includes more than1000 taxa. It covers the entire coastal and shelf region of Australia and dates back to 1938. To facilitate analysis across the multiple data sets species names have been standardized according to the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS; http://www.marinespecies.org/about.php) and all abundances converted to abundance per m3. Anomalous or unsubstantiated data have been removed. Most of the records are for copepods (70395) but there are also data for other zooplankton groups including adult and larval decapods (4649) chaetognaths (2999) appendicularians (2713) thaliaceans (1752) and cladocerans (1695) amongst others. Wherever possible metadata are provided for each record including dates locations and information on sampling methods such as mesh size. Some of these data have previously been used to generate species distribution maps for the Australian Taxonomic Guide and Atlas (Richardson et al. 2013; Swadling et al. 2013). _____ Experimental or sampling design: Data have been collected using different equipment and sampling designs. Zooplankton have been generally collected by net although Project 597 has used a Continuous Plankton Recorder. Nets used have varying mesh sizes and we have included these where available. Data have been sourced from research cruises student projects published literature and time series surveys. Details of each project are described in the file zooplankton_metadata.csv. These metadata should allow users to understand how the data compare with those from other projects when analyzing across data sets. Unit of abundance = CountPerSqM, Unit of biomass = NA

Citation(s)

Davies, C. H., Armstrong, A. J., Baird, M., Coman, F., Edgar, S., Gaughan, D., Greenwood, J., Gusmão, F., Henschke, N., Koslow, J. A., Leterme, S. C., McKinnon, A. D., Miller, M., Pausina, S., Palomino, J. U., Roennfeldt, R.-L., Rothlisberg, P., Slotwinski, A., Strzelecki, J., Suthers, I. M., Swadling, K. M., Talbot, S., Tonks, M., Tranter, D. H., Young, J. W. & Richardson, A. J. (2014) Over 75 years of zooplankton data from Australia. Ecology, 95, 3229. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/14-0697.1.