standardization of environmental data and information - International ...

Chapter 20
Open Discussion on Standardization
Strategies
Dr. Craig R. Smith, Professor, Department of Oceanography,
University of Hawaii, Honolulu, United States of America
SUMMARY OF DISCUSSION
Dr. Smith moderated an open discussion aimed at identifying
aspects of data collection and management that could be profitably
centralized, and models or general approaches that might facilitate
standardization in particular areas. He began by defining “profitable”
centralization as the kind that would minimize or reduce the cost and effort
invested by seabed contractors and others, while enabling them to arrive
more efficiently at scientific and monitoring conclusions.
Taxonomy
Smith said the need for taxonomic centralization and for some kind
of centralization of collections was clear, at least to the biological advisers
at the Workshop. Giving an example of why he felt the need for a uniform
taxonomy to guide the contractors’ programmes was obvious, he cited the
case of one of his post-doctoral students, Adrian Glover, who had been
investigating the polychaete collection from the EqPac (equatorial Pacific
Ocean) studies. Working with Gordon Paterson at The Natural History
Museum, London, the student had identified or differentiated all the
polychaetes from the equatorial Pacific collection, and wanted to compare
them with those collected by Echo-1, an earlier environmental study, which
had been classified by another taxonomist, Kristian Fauchald at the
Smithsonian Institution. Fauchald and Paterson were excellent taxonomists
but because they had not worked together it was not known whether the
species from the equatorial Pacific were the same as those found in the
Echo-1 study. Thus, nothing could be said about species ranges. At some
point, Glover might have to go to the Smithsonian and spend months going
through Fauchald’s collection to see whether his species A, for example,
corresponded to one of the species there. Clearly, this was a problem for
the contractors as well, for if they wanted to understand the potential for
extinction in a mining area, they would have do a diversity comparison by
looking at the distribution of particular species.
INTERNATIONAL SEABED AUTHORITY 459