Description
A research program has been initiated by the Minerals Management Service (Contract No. 1435-01-99-CT-30991) to gain better knowledge of the benthic communities of the deep Gulf of Mexico entitled “The Deepwater Program: Northern Gulf of Mexico Continental Slope Habitat and Benthic Ecology.”
Increasing exploration and exploitation of fossil hydrocarbon resources in the deep-sea prompted the Minerals Management Service of the U.S. Department of the Interior to support an investigation of the structure and function of the assemblages of organisms that live in association with the sea floor in the deep-sea. The program, Deep Gulf of Mexico Benthos or DGoMB, is studying the northern Gulf of Mexico (GOM) continental slope from water depths of 300 meters on the upper continental slope out to greater than 3,000 meters water depth seaward of the base of the Sigsbee and Florida Escarpments. The study is focused on areas that are the most likely targets of future resource exploration and exploitation. However, to develop a Gulf-wide perspective of deep-sea communities, sampling in areas beyond those thought to be potential areas for exploration has been included in the study design. A major enhancement in the program is the extension of the transects onto the abyssal plain of the central Gulf of Mexico through collaborative studies with Mexican scientists. This additional work effort will allow assessment of benthic communities structure and function throughout the basin by sampling the deepest habitats in the region.
The program is designed to gain a better ability to predict variations in the structure and function of animal assemblages in relation to water depth, geographic location, time and overlying water mass. Biological studies are integrated with measurements of physical and chemical hydrographic parameters, sediment geochemical properties and geological characteristics that are known to influence benthic community distributions and dynamics. Eight (8) hypotheses are being tested on the basis of measures of benthic community structure. It is hypothesized that community structure varies as a function of: 1) water depth, 2) geographic location (east vs. west), 3) association with canyons, 4) association with mid-slope basins, 5) sea surface primary productivity, 6) proximity to hydrocarbon seeps, 7) time (seasonal and interannual scales), and 8) association with the base of escarpments.
This dataset includes the meiofauna abundance and biomass that were observed in this study. Meiofauna include nematode worms, harpacticoid copepods, and several other taxa. In some studies benthic forams are also included, but in this model, forams are considered part of the microbiota because they are single-celled organisms, rather than metazoans.
Data Records
The data in this sampling event resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 60 records.
1 extension data tables also exist. An extension record supplies extra information about a core record. The number of records in each extension data table is illustrated below.
This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.
Versions
The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.
How to cite
Researchers should cite this work as follows:
Wolff G, Rowe G, Kennicutt M, Presley B, Bernhard J, Morse J, Montagna P, Nowlin W, Bryant W, Wade T (2023). The Deepwater Program: Northern Gulf of Mexico Continental Slope Habitat and Benthic Ecology - DgoMB: Meios. Version 1.4. United States Geological Survey. Samplingevent dataset. https://ipt-obis.gbif.us/resource?r=dgomb_meio&v=1.4
Rights
Researchers should respect the following rights statement:
The publisher and rights holder of this work is United States Geological Survey. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) License.
GBIF Registration
This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: 3bf0d17c-98a9-41a5-af43-5fe2719cc19b. United States Geological Survey publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by GBIF-US.
Keywords
Samplingevent
External data
The resource data is also available in other formats
| NCEI Archive Accession | https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/a-survey-to-characterize-the-principal-components-of-benthic-communities-over-the-entire-northe UTF-8 TSV |
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Contacts
- Metadata Provider ●
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- Point Of Contact
- Research Scientist
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- Professor Emeritus
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- Professor of Oceanography
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https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4391-107X
Geographic Coverage
Gulf of Mexico
| Bounding Coordinates | South West [23.5, -96.003], North East [29.335, -85.5] |
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Bibliographic Citations
- Rowe, G.T. and M.C. Kennicutt II, eds. 2009. Northern Gulf of Mexico continental slope habitats and benthic ecology study: Final report. U.S. Dept, of the Interior, Minerals Management. Service, Gulf of Mexico OCS Region, New Orleans, LA. OCS Study MMS 2009-039. 456 pp. https://www.fws.gov/doiddata/dwh-ar-documents/1187/DWH-AR0009351.pdf
- Physical oceanographic conditions in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico in summer 2000–2002 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dsr2.2008.07.003
- Montagna, P.A., Baguley, J.G., Reuscher, M.G., Rowe, G.T., Wade, T.L. (2020). Linking Abiotic Variables with Macrofaunal and Meiofaunal Abundance and Community Structure Patterns on the Gulf of Mexico Continental Slope. In: , et al. Scenarios and Responses to Future Deep Oil Spills. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12963-7_7 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12963-7_7
Additional Metadata
marine, harvested by OBIS
| Alternative Identifiers | 3bf0d17c-98a9-41a5-af43-5fe2719cc19b |
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| https://ipt-obis.gbif.us/resource?r=dgomb_meio |