SEAMAP Ichthoplankton Databases Provided to NRDA

The Southeast Fisheries Science Center Mississippi Laboratories has collected standardized ichthyoplankton resource surveys in the Gulf of Mexico since 1982. Several surveys are conducted throughout the year and focus on different areas of the northern Gulf of Mexico. The spring survey is an offshore survey that samples primarily from the edge of the continental shelf to the Economic Exclusion Zone, while the summer and fall surveys primarily focus on the continental shelf. Typically, the fall plankton survey is selected as the source of larval abundance data because of its spatial coverage, as opposed to surveys in the summer which did not adequately cover the eastern Gulf of Mexico prior to 2008. Data from these standardized surveys were provided to the Natural Resources Damage Assessment (NRDA) to support assessment of the environmental impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill which occurred in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

To provide data to support the Natural Resources Damage Assessment (NRDA) in order to evaluate the impacts of the Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Contact the individual identified as the distributor for this dataset. Please include the title of the dataset and the name of the data steward when requesting a copy of this data.

There are not restrictions or legal prerequisites for accessing this data.

NOAA NMFS does not approve, recommend, or endorse any proprietary product or proprietary material mentioned in this publication. No reference shall be made to NMFS, or to this publication furnished by NMFS, in any advertising or sales promotion which would indicate or imply that NMFS approves, recommends, or endorses any proprietary product or proprietary material mentioned herein or which has as its purpose any intent to cause directly or indirectly the advertised product to be used or purchased because of this NMFS publication. NMFS is not responsible for any uses of these datasets beyond those for which they were intended, and NMFS makes no claims regarding the accuracy of any data provided by agencies or individuals outside NMFS. Acknowledgement of NOAA NMFS and SEAMAP would be appreciated in products derived or publications generated from this data.

Validation routines are applied during data entry to ensure the integrity of data collected. Data validation routines are also applied as data are migrated into the centralized data management system.

Data resides on Networked Attached Storage (NAS) environment. Security patches/updates are immediately applied to the host environment. Data is stripped/mirrored using RAID 50 technology to protect data from disk failure. Nightly backups are preformed and files are written to magnetic tape and stored in an onsite / offsite location.

Plankton samples are collected by neuston and bongo nets. Samples are brought back to the laboratory and sent to the Polish Sorting Center for processing. Processing includes specimen identification and numbers of species. At the end of each survey all other collected data are reviewed for accuracy/relevance by chief scientists. Specimen verification following sorting and identification are conducted by research biologists to confirm identifications.