Dataset

The Australian Phytoplankton Database (1844 onwards)

OBIS Australia Open in mapper Explore occurrences

There have been many individual phytoplankton datasets collected across Australia since the mid 1900s, but most are unavailable to the research community. We have searched archives, contacted researchers, and scanned the primary and grey literature to collate 3,665,221 records of marine phytoplankton species from Australian waters from 1844 to the present. Many of these are small datasets collected for local questions, but combined they provide over 170 years of data on phytoplankton communities in Australian waters. Units and taxonomy have been standardised, obviously erroneous data removed, and all metadata included. We have lodged this dataset with the Australian Ocean Data Network (http://imos.aodn.org.au/), allowing public access. The Australian Phytoplankton Database will be invaluable for global change studies, as it allows analysis of ecological indicators of climate change and eutrophication (e.g., changes in distribution; diatom:dinoflagellate ratios). In addition, the standardised conversion of abundance records to biomass provides modellers with quantifiable data to initialise and validate ecosystem models of lower marine trophic levels. This version of the database has been modified by 1) excluded existing data from IMOS, Antarctic Projects (597,599,744,746,748) as recorded in in imos_plankton.imos_apd_metadata 2) absence records have been removed.

Citation: Davies C (2023): The Australian Phytoplankton Database (1844 onwards). v1.10. CSIRO National Collections and Marine Infrastructure (NCMI) Information and Data Centre (IDC). Dataset/Occurrence. https://www.marine.csiro.au/ipt/resource?r=imos_apd_data&v=1.10

Published: August 11, 2023 at 11:19

URL: https://www.marine.csiro.au/ipt/resource?r=imos_apd_data

185,048
occurrence records
1,605
taxa
1,192
species

Taxa

Missing and invalid fields

Field Missing Invalid
decimalLatitude 6,754
3.6%
decimalLongitude 6,762
3.7%
eventDate 5,698
3.1%
maximumDepthInMeters 114,265
61.7%
minimumDepthInMeters 114,265
61.7%
scientificNameID 1,581
0.9%

Quality flags

The OBIS data quality flags are documented at https://github.com/iobis/obis-qc.

Flag Dropped Records
NO_DEPTH 114,265
61.7%
ON_LAND 56,083
30.3%
NO_ACCEPTED_NAME 11,351
6.1%
NO_COORD 6,762
3.7%
MARINE_UNSURE 3,481
1.9%
NO_MATCH 1,581
0.9%
NOT_MARINE 661
0.4%
DEPTH_EXCEEDS_BATH 66
0.0%

Measurement types

DNA derived data