Biology subjects

Purser, A.

Publications and source records attributed to Purser, A..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2023

The Antarctic Seafloor Annotated Imagery Database

Marine imagery is a comparatively cost-effective way to collect data on seafloor organisms, biodiversity and habitat morphology. However, annotating these images to extract detailed biological information is time-consuming and expensive, and reference libraries of consistently annotated seafloor images are rarely publicly available. Here, we present the Antarctic Seafloor Annotated Imagery Database (AS-AID), a result of a multinational collaboration to collate and annotate regional seafloor imagery datasets from 19 Antarctic research cruises between 1985 and 2019. AS-AID comprises of 3,599 georeferenced downward facing seafloor images that have been labelled with a total of 615,051 expert annotations. Annotations are based on the CATAMI (Collaborative and Automated Tools for Analysis of Marine Imagery) classification scheme and have been reviewed by experts. In addition, because the pixel location of each annotation within each image is available, annotations can be viewed easily and customised to suit individual research priorities. This dataset can be used to investigate species distributions, community patterns, it provides a reference to assess change through time, and can be used to train algorithms to automatically detect and annotate marine fauna.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2022

Habitat types and megabenthos composition from three sponge-dominated high-Arctic seamounts

Seamounts are isolated underwater mountains often stretching >1,000 m above the seafloor. They are usually identified as biodiversity hotspots of marine life, and host benthos assemblages that may vary on regional (among seamounts) and local (within seamounts) scales. Here, we collected seafloor imagery of three seamounts at the Langseth Ridge in the central Arctic Ocean to assess habitats and megabenthos community composition at the Central Mount (CM), the Karasik Seamount (KS), and the Northern Mount (NM). The majority of seafloor across these seamounts comprised bare rock, covered with a mixed layer consisting of sponge spicule mat intermixed with detrital debris composed primarily of polychaete tubes as well as sand, gravel, and/ or rocks. The megabenthos assemblages consisted of in total 15 invertebrate epibenthos taxa and four fish taxa, contributing to mean megabenthos densities of 55,745 ind. ha-1 at CM, 110,442 ind. ha-1 at KS, and 65,849 ind. ha-1 at NM. The faunal assemblages at all three seamounts were dominated by demosponges of the order Tetractinellida that contributed between 66% (KS) and 85% (CM) to all megabenthos. Megabenthos assemblages living on bare rock or on mixed substrate differed among seamounts and across individual seamounts.

ecology↗