standardization of environmental data and information - International ...

Listing some examples of the possible contents, he began with
basic station data such as the programme, cruise number, station number,
location depth, kind of gear used and sieve sizes. All of those seemed
obvious unless one had actually used some deep-sea electronic databases
in which it was difficult to reconstruct what had happened on a cruise.
Also important to include were the sampling circumstances, such as
the sea state and the condition of samples. He recalled occasions when
researchers, finding a sample that stood out because of its peculiarity, had
had to go back to the original logs to find out that there had been
something odd about the sample’s inclusion.
The location of material, where items had been archived in a
museum or other destination, was important for people who wanted to
access and work with them. He hoped that, for material properly
accessioned into a museum, the catalogue number would be included.
As to the variables to be included, he suggested that the
Workshop’s working groups make lists of items that should be in the
database. Information about biology, chemistry, physics, and benthic and
water-column ecology should all be integrated in the same database and
not kept in different places. Moreover, the database should be flexible. For
example, a natural historian working on benthic ecology should be able to
pull out all the polychaetes from the samples, along with their locations and
environmental parameters. Benthic ecologists interested in the relationship
between species diversity and sediment grain-size diversity should be able
to extract data on these and other environmental parameters. In that way,
relationships and associations could be established between the ecology
and physical parameters.
The database should also interface with analytical tools. Ideally, it
should be possible to extract the information, map it and plot it. In the
example he had mentioned, the data on polychaetes, sediment grain size
and locality might be used to make a contour plot to analyze the
relationship between the species diversity of the worms and sediment grainsize
diversity in the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone (CCFZ). The database
could be used to analyze other kinds of relationships that scientists in
different disciplines might think about.
The Authority should be advised to examine existing models rather
than try to reinvent the wheel. Myriam Sibuet had talked about the Biocean
system for something similar and John Lambshead had mentioned the
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