Print PagePreservation of historical data is essential toward an understanding of the cumulative effects of anthropogenic impacts on marine ecosystems, such as the shifting baselines syndrome or trophic cascades. Historic data on marine organisms are very scattered (much in hard copy only) and in many cases highly susceptible to loss by destructive hurricanes, thus, there is a pressing need to digitize, archive, disseminate, and synthesize these data. An effort is underway to collect and digitize trophic data from marine organisms in the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf effort represents but a small microcosm of a much larger national effort funded by the National Science Foundation, named DataNet Program, which aims to create a set of exemplar national and global data research infrastructure organizations. The mission of the Data Conservancy (one of two DataNet awards to date) is to develop the methods and protocols to conserve data across the disciplines of astronomy, life sciences, earth sciences, and social sciences. The vision of the Data Conservancy, as in the Gulf project, is to collect, organize, validate, and preserve data to address research on larger scales than now possible.
Results/Conclusions
We have ~700 hard copy references (many are digital) from peer reviewed literature, government reports, theses and dissertations, conference proceedings, and abstracts. Metadata lite, a condensed version of metadata that answers the who, what, where, when, and why, has been created for all ~700 references, while ~550 references have been geo-coded into a Geographic Information System database, and habitat data for ~420 references (using the Coastal and Marine Ecological Classification Standard) have been digitized. To date 674 species of fishes from 148 families are included. Most studies are from bays and estuaries ~525 or the continental shelf ~190. Only 7 are from the continental slope or deep sea, while 7 are from the mesopelagic realm. The most commonly examined species include Cynoscion nebulosus (86), Sciaenops ocellatus (66) and Leiostomus xanthurus (65). Issues such as resistance to data sharing, lack of ecological data standards and others are common to the Gulf trophic database and the Data Conservancy effort. Future work will include digitizing the trophic interaction data for all the fish species, and the inclusion of other taxa i.e. marine mammals, sea and shore birds, sea turtles, crustaceans, mollusks, cnidarians, ctenophores, and polychaetes, and uploading these data to the Data Conservancy.
