Krillbase
The ICED vision is to expand from the regional survey scale up to circumpolar and long time scale. This is a challenge, as each nation tends to work just in their “own” narrow slice of Antarctica. However there are a growing number of initiatives to pool data, with good Southern Ocean examples being for seals and penguins. Circumpolar-scale syntheses of nutrient and physical data have also been done, and satellites give great coverage of phytoplankton. This leaves a big gap - we need circumpolar-scale views for zooplankton - the key link between primary production and predators.
The KRILLBASE project aimed to fill this gap for two key zooplankters Euphausia superba (krill) and salps. This project started in the 1990s when its founders, Angus Atkinson, Volker Siegel and Evgeny Pakhomov recognised that there were actually masses of data on these two taxa. However it was scattered around, in dusty archives, faded logbooks, old disks or databases. By putting all of this lot together, we can learn things that each individual surveys could never tell us.
This data compilation is a mammoth task and is still ongoing. We have pooled data from the US, Ukraine, Germany, UK, Australia, Japan, South Africa, Spain, Chile and Poland, much of which being freely sent in the real spirit of Antarctic cooperation.
Structure of KRILLBASE
KRILLBASE comprises two separate databases, namely KRILLBASE-ABUNDANCE with circumpolar information on krill and salp numerical density and KRILLBASE-LENGTH FREQUENCY providing length distribution data just for krill.
Outputs from KRILLBASE
Obviously with any composite dataset, great care has to be taken that differences in methods do not lead to artefacts in the interpretations. This has been achieved for KRILLBASE both by reduction of the full dataset to comparable subsets and by the use of standardisation procedures (for more information see the supplementary material of Atkinson et al. 2008). It is not just useful for maps, but also gives information on long-term trends (Atkinson et al. 2004) in their abundance, clues as why krill live where they do around Antarctica (Atkinson et al. 2008), and the ability to estimate their total biomass and production (Atkinson et al. 2009) of relevance to fisheries management through CCAMLR. Here are the publications so far, either based on KRILLBASE or using KRILLBASE data:
- Atkinson A, Siegel V, Pakhomov E, Rothery P. (2004) Long-term decline inkrill stock and increase in salps within the Southern Ocean. Nature 432:100-103 pdf
- Atkinson A, Siegel V, Pakhomov EA, Rothery P, Loeb V, Ross RM, Quetin LB, Fretwell P, Schmidt K, Tarling GA, Murphy EJ, Fleming A (2008). Oceanic circumpolar habitats of Antarctic krill. Mar Ecol Prog Ser 362: 1-23 pdf
- Whitehouse MJ, Meredith MP, Rothery P, Atkinson A, Ward P, Korb RE (2008). Rapid warming of the ocean around South Georgia, Southern Ocean during the 20th Century: forcings, characteristics and implications for lower trophic levels.Deep-Sea Res I 55: 1218-1228 pdf
- Atkinson A, Siegel V, Pakhomov EA, Jessopp MJ, Loeb V (2009). A re-appraisal of the total biomass and production of Antarctic krill. Deep-Sea Res I 56:727-740 pdf
Requests for KRILLBASE
KRILLBASE is very much an ongoing project, and we have dealt with requests for the data for uses ranging from school projects up to a global biogeochemical model. We have been able to deal with most of these requests to everyone’s satisfaction, with the proviso being that some of the data are not “our own” to release freely. Examples of this are datasets derived from CCAMLR (The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources), a fisheries organisation with its own particular rules of data access. Likewise some of it has been derived from large, organised sampling programmes such as US AMLR ( Antarctic Marine Living Resources) and Palmer LTER. Requests for these particular datasets need to be addressed to the specific programs in question.
