standardization of environmental data and information - International ...

After an area has been selected for mining, two other areas as similar
as possible should be selected as control areas. These should be at a
sufficient distance from the mining operations that they will not be influenced
by the plume produced from collecting nodules or other mining activities. They
should also be similar in scale to the mining area (e.g. figure 5). In each area,
three stations should be selected at random for sampling (e.g. figure 5),
providing nine permanent stations that will be followed through time. Each
station should be sampled four times before the onset of mining operations
and four times after mining begins. This is essential to provide temporal
replication. The time scales will need to be decided, but a reasonable
approach might be to use some sort of log series (4, 2, 1, 0.5 years before and
0.5, 2, 4, 8 yrs after). At each sampling (cruise), three 0.25-square-metre box
cores should be taken at each station. This produces 27 box cores per year,
with 216 over the entire 12 years. Although this may seem excessive, keep in
mind that these are abyssal samples and, at least for the macrofauna, they will
have on average about 100 individuals per box core. These cores should not
take as long to sort as the bathyal cores most deep-sea biologists are familiar
with.
c
c
Control Site 2
c
x
x
c
c
c
Control Site 1
x
Impact Site 1
Figure 5
One impact site (receiving an anthropogenic effect) and two
control sites. Each site has three stations (represented by the X or
C) positioned at random within the site. At each station, three
replicate box cores would be taken during each cruise.
Several important factors will need to be considered. First, it may be
desirable to have more stations within the impact area. For instance, one may
want to have a series of stations different distances from mining operations to
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