What is SeamountsOnline?

SeamountsOnline is a NSF-funded project designed to gather information on species found in seamount habitats, and to provide a freely-available online resource for accessing and downloading these data. It is designed to facilitate research into seamount ecology, and to act as a resource for managers. For more information, see the original project proposal (pdf).

Data Content Notes

SeamountsOnline holds data on species that have been recorded from seamounts. Taxonomically, all metazoan species are considered and, spatially, all seamounts globally are included. SeamountsOnline is in active development, and data content is periodically expanded. Please refer to the data introduction page for more information on our current coverage.

To Start Getting Data:

- Search for species distributions
- Search for sample effort information
- Search for literature

How to cite SeamountsOnline

if you use data in SeamountsOnline, please give credit to the data providers, as shown here

Seamount news

New seamount books:

• Seamounts: Ecology, Fishries and Conservation. 2007. T. Pitcher, T. Morato, P. Hart, M. Clark, N. Haggan, and R. Santos (eds). Blackwell Publishing. More information
• Biogeography of the North Atlantic Seamounts. 2006. A.N. Mironov, A.V. Gebruk, and A.J. Southward (eds). KMK Scientific Press, Moscow, 196 pp. For more information, contact Andrey Gebruk, agebruk 'at' ocean.ru.

 

What is the current status of SeamountsOnline? updated 8 January 2007

SeamountsOnline is currently transitioning to a new design. Major upgrades will be the addition of more information about the seamounts, more information on the samples taken (for quantitative data), and the addition of a map interface for searching and retrieving data. Please be patient as we finish this work - you'll see a much improved website when that is complete.

The latest version of SeamountsOnline is version 2005.1, uploaded on 12 May 2005. We now have a total of 12,000 records from 231 seamounts. Some of the major new content is listed below; see the Data Contents page for a full listing.

Fish and Invertebrate data from Russian and former-Soviet expeditions: hundreds of samples and thousands of fish and invertebrate observations from seamounts globally. Provided by Andrey Gebruk, Sergei Evseenko and other scientists at the P.P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology.
• Molluscs of Ormonde Seamount. Provided by Sergio Avila, and described in Avila, S.P. and M.A.E. Malaquias. 2003. Biogeographic relationships of the molluscan fauna of Ormonde Seamount (Gorringe Bank, Northeast Atlantic Ocean). Journal of Molluscan Studies 69(2): 145-150.
• Deep Corals of the Northeast Pacific, provided by Peter Etnoyer and published as Etnoyer, P. and L. Morgan. 2003. Occurrences of Habitat-forming Deep Sea Corals in the Northeast Pacific Ocean: A Report to NOAA’s Office of Habitat Conservation. Marine Conservation Biology Institute. Available online at http://www.mcbi.org/destructive/DSC_occurrences.pdf.
• An inventory of EU-region seamounts by WWF.
  
• Fishes and updated benthic invertebrates from seamounts near Tasmania. Thanks to
Tony Koslow, Franzis Althaus, Karen Gowlett-Holmes and others at CSIRO for these data.
• New data on the Lord Howe Seamounts and updated data on the Norfolk Ridge seamounts south of New Caledonia in the Southwest Pacific. Provided by Chauvin and Richer de Forges.
• Seamount data from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography's Benthic Invertebrate Collection (external link).
• Fish from the Great Meteor Seamounts. From Uiblein, F., A. Geldmacher, F. Koster, W. Nellen and G. Kraus. 1999. Species composition and depth distribution of fish species collected in the area of the Great Meteor Seamount, Eastern Central Atlantic, during cruise m42/3, with seventeen new records. Informes Técnicos del Instituto Canario de Ciencias Marina 5: 48-79.
• Hundreds of new literature entries.

Our thanks to those who have provided data for the SeamountsOnline project. SeamountsOnline can get the best quality data and grow most quickly when researchers are willing to contribute datasets directly in electronic form. All the datasets listed above were provided in digital form - we thank these researchers for their generosity. Do you have data from seamounts you may be willing to contribute?  Please read on..

Still to Come: SeamountsOnline is continually entering new data. Datasets we are in the process of incorporating include:

- Ichthyoplankton data from George Boehlert
- Seamount records from FishBase (external link)
- Seamount records from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography's Marine Vertebrate Collection (external link)

We want your feedback...

Please, let us know what you think! You can email us at kstocks "at" sdsc.edu (replace "at" with @). Find problems?  Frustrated?  Wishing for other features?  Drop us a line!

Products Available - the products below are freely available; if you use them, please credit this web page as the source

- Searchable database of seamount biota: SeamountsOnline contains over 6000 records of species that have been collected from seamounts and can be searched by species name, seamount name, or geographical location.  Go to the Introduction for the Data Portal to learn about ways to search the system.

- Relational Database Design: SeamountsOnline is supported by a species-based relational database in Microsoft Access. The design is provided here in the hopes that it may prove useful to other projects storing similar data.

-Bibliography of Seamount Resources: In the course of developing SeamountsOnline, over 1,000 literature citations have been collected relating to seamounts. The coverage is most comprehensive for biological sampling on seamounts. Geology, hydrology, chemistry, etc. are also represented, but the coverage is not as thorough. The bibliography can be searched for references of interest or downloaded as whole through the Search References feature

- Click here to see a publication about SeamountsOnline in the Fisheries Center Research Report 2004 12(5).
- Click here to see the poster on endemism patterns in fishes of the Hawaiian/Emperor seamount chain. Presented at “Frontiers in Biogeography, the Inaugural Meeting of the International Biogeography Society”, Mesquite, Nevada, Jan 4-8 (Microsoft Powerpoint format)

SeamountsOnline is supported by the National Science Foundation, and by the resources of the San Diego Supercomputer Center and Scripps Institution of Oceanography