Downey, R. | bioRxiv Science

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↗

bioRxiv2020

Predicting potential impacts of ocean acidification on marine calcifiersfrom the Southern Ocean

Understanding the vulnerability of marine calcifiers to ocean acidification is a critical issue, especially in the Southern Ocean (SO), which is likely to be the one of the first, and most severely affected regions. Since the industrial revolution, ~30% of anthropogenic CO2 has been absorbed by the oceans. Seawater pH levels have already decreased by 0.1 and are predicted to decline by ~ 0.3 by the year 2100. This process, known as ocean acidification (OA), is shallowing the saturation horizon, which is the depth below which calcium carbonate (CaCO3) dissolves, likely increasing the vulnerability of many marine calcifiers to dissolution. The negative impact of OA may be seen first in species depositing more soluble CaCO3 mineral phases such as aragonite and high-Mg calcite (HMC). These negative effects may become even exacerbated by increasing sea temperatures. Here we combine a review and a quantitative meta-analysis to provide an overview of the current state of knowledge about skeletal mineralogy of major taxonomic groups of SO marine calcifiers and to make predictions about how OA might affect different taxa. We consider their geographic range, skeletal mineralogy, biological traits and potential strategies to overcome OA. The meta-analysis of studies investigating the effects of the OA on a range of biological responses such as shell state, development and growth rate shows response variation depending on mineralogical composition. Species-specific responses due to mineralogical composition suggest taxa with calcitic, aragonitic and HMC skeletons may be more vulnerable to the expected carbonate chemistry alterations, and low magnesium calcite (LMC) species may be mostly resilient. Environmental and biological control on the calcification process and/or Mg content in calcite, biological traits and physiological processes are also expected to influence species specific responses.

ecology↗