IMIS

De Beers Marine Namibia undertake marine diamond mining to depths of 130 m offshore of southern Namibia using remote mining tools. As part of their mining licence agreement with the Government of Namibia, De Beers Marine Namibia have undertaken a number of baseline and impact monitoring surveys with the view to quantitatively assessing the direct and indirect effects of deep-water marine mining on benthic macrofaunal communities, and to monitor post-mining recovery. Benthic grab samples were collected from both mined and unmined sites in 2005 - 2008 and 2011, using a Van Veen grab. Macrofauna was identified, and abundance and biomass determined. The data were made available to AfrOBIS as a series of Excel sheets. At AfrOBIS, the data were quality-controlled and transformed to comply with the Darwin Core/OBIS Schema. Funds for data operations were kindly provided by the Census of Marine Life International Cosmos Prize Fund, through a grant to Rutgers University.