CS-PHOC: weekly census counts of Southern Ocean phocids at Cape Shirreff, Livingston Island

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 483 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:

Woodman S M, Borras-Chavez R, Goebel M E, Torres D, Aguayo A, Krause D J (2024). CS-PHOC: weekly census counts of Southern Ocean phocids at Cape Shirreff, Livingston Island. Version 2.2. SCAR - AntOBIS. Samplingevent dataset. https://doi.org/10.48361/gklk1u

Rights

Researchers should respect the following rights statement:

The publisher and rights holder of this work is SCAR - AntOBIS. To the extent possible under law, the publisher has waived all rights to these data and has dedicated them to the Public Domain (CC0 1.0). Users may copy, modify, distribute and use the work, including for commercial purposes, without restriction.

GBIF Registration

This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: 2945946f-8a97-41e4-952d-f0a9438b0f2e.  SCAR - AntOBIS publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by Ocean Biodiversity Information System.

Keywords

Samplingevent; OCEAN; SOUTHERN OCEAN; ANTARCTICA; MARINE MAMMALS; PINNIPED; BIOGEOGRAPHY; census count data; Observation

Contacts

Geographic Coverage

Cape Shirreff, Livingston Island

Taxonomic Coverage

All phocids were identified to species level

Temporal Coverage

Project Data

This project provides census count data of Southern Ocean phocids at Cape Shirreff, Livingston Island.

Sampling Methods

This dataset consists of census counts of four Southern Ocean phocids during the austral summer at Cape Shirreff, Livingston Island, from 1997 through the time of publication. Counts were performed by trained INACH or U.S. AMLR field biologists following a standardized sampling protocol. Count data were grouped and aggregated to provide a single, comparable count for each species for each census. Methods are further described in Woodman et al. (2024).

Method step description:

1. All data were collected at Cape Shirreff (62.47° S, 60.77° W) on the north shore of Livingston Island. Bounded by glaciers to the south, Cape Shirreff is approximately 3 km long and 1.5 km wide. The Cape Shirreff Phocid Census (CS-PHOC) surveys were conducted by INACH from 1997/98 to 2006/07. The U.S. AMLR Pinniped Research Program resumed these surveys in 2009/10, and, except for 2020/21 when the field season was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, has performed them every season through the time of publication. Most CS-PHOC surveys were completed within one day, but occasionally spanned two or three days due to extenuating circumstances (e.g., weather).
2. The INACH and U.S. AMLR programs both followed the same overall census protocol, where trained field technicians surveyed all safely accessible regions of Cape Shirreff and recorded all live phocids. They collected counts of each species, as well as age class and sex when possible. While the full extent of the area surveyed varied slightly across and within seasons, core census locations were always surveyed. These core census locations span the vast majority of the coastline and phocid haul-out locations at Cape Shirreff, thereby ensuring that CS-PHOC counts are representative of phocid haul-out at Cape Shirreff during each census window. Locations were surveyed on foot, either by walking through haul-out locations, or using binoculars from a high vantage point when practical. Counts were recorded in field notebooks. After the census, data were either entered into a database or otherwise archived.
3. Entered data varied slightly across programs. Specifically, data from INACH surveys included explicit zero records when there were none of a particular phocid species at a location, while U.S. AMLR records did not include explicit zero records. After consultation with the U.S. AMLR program directors, explicit records with zeroes or missing codes as appropriate, were added to the U.S. AMLR data for core census locations for this dataset.
4. Data records were compiled from historical documents, field notebooks, Excel files, and a SQL Server database. INACH historical data (i.e., paper records, reports, Excel files) were consolidated into Excel files. These INACH files, along with historical U.S. AMLR Excel files, were imported into the U.S. AMLR Pinniped SQL Server database using R (R Core Team 2023). Once in the database, all data were read into R, where they were cleaned and standardized as follows. Location names and count types (i.e., age class and sex) were converted to standard names, and columns containing count data were aggregated to the lowest resolution across datasets. For instance, some seasons male and female pup counts were recorded separately, but during others only a single pup count was recorded. For this dataset, all pup counts were aggregated to a single, total pup count for each census record.
5. After cleaning, records were grouped and aggregated to provide a single, comparable count for each species for each census. Specifically, records were filtered for core census locations, and counts were summed after grouping by census and pinniped species. These core census location count values, along with counts for one other regularly-surveyed location, make up the published CS-PHOC dataset.

Bibliographic Citations

1. Woodman, S.M., Borras-Chavez, R., Goebel, M.E., Torres, D., Aguayo, A., Krause, D.J. CS-PHOC: weekly census counts of Southern Ocean phocids at Cape Shirreff, Livingston Island. Sci Data 11, 895 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03744-9
2. Thomas A. Jefferson, Marc A. Webber and Robert L. Pitman. Marine Mammals of the World: a comprehensive guide to their identification, 2nd Edition (Elsevier, 2015). https://doi.org/10.1016/C2012-0-06919-0
3. https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/inport/item/70769 GUID: gov.noaa.nmfs.inport:70769
4. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research. (2023). SCAR Report 42 - September 2022 - SCAR Data Policy (2022). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7825314

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