Cataloguing and monitoring changes in Arctic marine biodiversity through SCUBA diving

• Published in: PeerJ preprints 2018-04
• Main Authors: Gibbs, Donna M, Gibbs, Charles J, Schultz, Jessica A
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biodiversity; Dissolved oxygen; Diving; Photography; Species
• ISSN: 2167-9843
• DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.26850v1

Since 2014 divers from Ocean Wise have been SCUBA diving in the Cambridge Bay, Nunavut area collecting data on fishes, invertebrates and marine plants at numerous sites. For each dive a file is created that catalogues the species found and a rough abundance of that species. These files accumulate over time and are searchable by location, year, year and month, month, species and a number of other criteria with custom software created for this purpose. Relationships between species is automatic with the searches. In addition to the species catalogue that began in 2014, data has been scrounged from previous collecting trips by staff and personal dive logs before 2014, allowing for comparison between Pond Inlet, Resolute and Cambridge Bay. We were able to flag a potential decline in one species in 2017 thanks to our previous data. Our goal is to work to cooperatively with others diving in the Arctic to grow this database through photography and dive records. At this point we have 149 dives/records and 279 species recorded. The database is used to support the Nearshore Ecological Surveys and the Arctic Marine Ecological Benchmarking Program reports. In addition to biodiversity data, temperature, salinity, pH and dissolved oxygen are also collected while in the area.