standardization of environmental data and information - International ...

species so long as everybody used the same criteria. The London museum
addressed this issue for meiofaunal groups by holding workshops and
appointing specialists from around the world for every group. For example,
London might do nematodes while the Paris museum dealt with copepods
and polychaetes were handled by Fauchald at the Smithsonian. The
specialist who coordinated the polychaete criteria would not tell people
what to do; rather, he/she would operate through workshops at some
convenient location where several experts could assemble and take
responsibility. In addition, experts collaborated with each other by
calibrating different collections to be sure they used the same species
criteria. If a contractor ran into a problem, it could have an E-mail address
for the coordinator, who would pass the matter on to the appropriate party.
The contractor might also send a representative to the specialized
workshops, where the experts could give advice and build a relationship.
This was not complicated; the London museum did it all the time at
nematode workshops, where it trained people from all over the world at low
cost.
Expressing interest in this approach, a contractor said his group had
problems with taxonomy and would like to see work done on that issue.
First, however, he wondered whether contractors should have responsibility
regarding the taxonomy or genetics of all the benthic and plankton species.
Second, as the transfer of knowledge was easy in the modern world, and as
people could readily be sent somewhere for training, such activity did not
have to be concentrated at one place or time. For many years there had
been calls for international cooperation on the environmental aspects of
deep-sea mining. Such cooperation could take the form of international
programmes in designated areas, including those assigned to pioneer
investors, and also having the Authority organize an international
environmental research team to do the work that the Authority was asking
the contractors to do. Every contractor could contribute to such a team.
Smith responded that contractors should clearly not be expected to
identify all groups from picoplankton to megabenthos. Certain key groups
likely to be impacted were important for evaluating impacts. The Workshop
should identify what faunal groups and what part of the environment should
be a focus of environmental studies. The biggest impacts were expected to
be on the seafloor, where polychaetes were the largest component of the
macrofauna. They constituted a diverse group for which species-level data
were needed. Nematodes seemed to be another likely group.
INTERNATIONAL SEABED AUTHORITY 461