IMIS

Information regarding the Mollusca in this dataset is derived from Agassiz trawl (AGT) samples collected on shelf plateau and slope off the South Orkney Islands, Antarctica, within and outside of the South Orkney Islands Southern Shelf marine protected area. Sampling was conducted in the framework of the British Antarctic Survey/SCAR “South Orkneys - State of the Antarctic Ecosystem” (SO-AntEco) project aboard RRS James Clark Ross during expedition JR15005 in Austral summer 2016. Of 78 successful AGT deployments, 44 trawls at depths ranging from 235-2194 m contained living Mollusca, totaling 2276 individuals, 67 morphospecies and 163 distributional records. Of these, 1999 individuals were Bivalvia (accounting for 15 species), 158 Gastropoda (45 species), 113 Scaphopoda (2 species), 4 Polyplacophora (3 species) and 2 Aplacophora (2 species); empty shells were also collected and recorded in the data table. Three morphospecies (1 Bivalvia and 2 Gastropoda) were collected exclusively as empty shells, thus yielding a total of 70 morphospecies represented in the dataset. All individuals were preserved in undenatured ethanol and are stored as vouchers in the collections of the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, United Kingdom. This dataset constitutes a valuable contribution to the knowledge of megafaunal Mollusca associated with a range of benthic habitat types in the South Orkney Islands, an exceptionally diverse region of the Southern Ocean.

This dataset is published by British Antarctic Survey (BAS) under the license CC-BY 4.0. We would appreciate it if you could follow the guidelines from the SCAR and IPY Data Policies (https://www.scar.org/excom-meetings/xxxi-scar-delegates-2010-buenos-aires-argentina/4563-scar-xxxi-ip04b-scar-data-policy/file/) when using the data. If you have any questions regarding this dataset, do not hesitate to contact us via the contact information provided in the metadata or via data-biodiversity-aq@naturalsciences.be. Issues with the dataset can be reported at https://github.com/biodiversity-aq/data-publication/

This dataset is part of the Biodiversity, Evolution and Adaptation Project of the Environmental Change and Evolution Program of the British Antarctic Survey. Cruise report of the expedition is available at https://www.bodc.ac.uk/resources/inventories/cruise_inventory/reports/jr15005.pdf