Deep Sea Lebensspuren: Biological Features on the Seafloor of the Eastern and Western Australian Margin

Much of the deep sea encompasses soft-sediment plains, with very few hard substrates for invertebrates to colonise. At first glance, these habitats seem barren, but they are actually teeming with life. Compared to organisms from shallow water, many animals here are quite small. In addition, most of the animals are infaunal, meaning they live within the sediment. During feeding and burrowing, these animals form a range of features called lebensspuren, defined as any type of sedimentary structure produced by a living organism. Sampling deep sea animals can be a challenge, and traditional methods of grabs and boxcores provide only a single snapshot of a small area to characterise broad regions. Underwater imagery facilitates the characterisation of biological communities over a larger area, but the quantification of biodiversity from video is often restricted to larger epifauna, thus reducing its utility to measure biodiversity in deep sea soft sediments where animals are often small or infaunal. High resolution still images provide an interesting avenue with which to quantify biological activity based on lebensspuren.


In this study, we used thousands of still images taken along the edge of the Eastern and Western margins of Australia to identify and characterise deep-sea lebensppuren. The features identified were compiled into a Lebensspuren Directory (Section 7), and the data was used to correlate abiotic factors to lebensspuren and to valuate whether the quantification of lebensspuren from still photographs is an appropriate technique for broadly quantifying biological activity and diversity in the deep sea (Sections 2 - 6).

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Identification info

Date (Publication)
2009-01-01T00:00:00
Citation identifier
Geoscience Australia Persistent Identifier/https://pid.geoscience.gov.au/dataset/ga/69358

Cited responsible party
Role Organisation / Individual Name Details
Publisher

Geoscience Australia

 Canberra
Author

Dundas, K.

 1
Author

Przeslawski, R.

 2
Name

Record

Issue identification

2009/026

ISBN

9781921672057

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EGD
Owner

Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)
Custodian

Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)

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Topic category
  • Geoscientific information

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N
S
E
W


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Unknown

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Title

Product data repository: Various Formats

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Data Store directory containing the digital product files

Data Store directory containing one or more files, possibly in a variety of formats, accessible to Geoscience Australia staff only for internal purposes

Keywords

  • GA Publication

  • Record

Theme

  • seabed

Theme

  • marine

Keywords

  • AU-WA

Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC)

  • Earth Sciences

Keywords

  • Published_External

Resource constraints

Title

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence

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CC-BY

Edition

4.0

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

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License
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License

Resource constraints

Title

Australian Government Security ClassificationSystem

Edition date
2018-11-01T00:00:00
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https://www.protectivesecurity.gov.au/Pages/default.aspx

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Unclassified
Language
English
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UTF8

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Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)

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OnLine resource

Download the Record (pdf)

Download the Record (pdf)

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  • pdf

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Unknown

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Non geographic dataset
Other

GA Publication

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Metadata constraints

Title

Australian Government Security ClassificationSystem

Edition date
2018-11-01T00:00:00
Website

https://www.protectivesecurity.gov.au/Pages/default.aspx

Classification
Unclassified

Metadata

Metadata identifier
urn:uuid/a05f7892-ed22-7506-e044-00144fdd4fa6

Title

GeoNetwork UUID

Language
English
Character encoding
UTF8
Contact
Role Organisation / Individual Name Details
Point of contact

Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia)

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Type of resource

Resource scope
Document
Name

GA Record

Alternative metadata reference

Title

Geoscience Australia - short identifier for metadata record with

uuid

Citation identifier
eCatId/69358

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https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/a05f7892-ed22-7506-e044-00144fdd4fa6

Date info (Revision)
2018-04-20T06:16:17
Date info (Creation)
2009-08-03T00:00:00

Metadata standard

Title

AU/NZS ISO 19115-1:2014

Metadata standard

Title

ISO 19115-1:2014

Metadata standard

Title

ISO 19115-3

Title

Geoscience Australia Community Metadata Profile of ISO 19115-1:2014

Edition

Version 2.0, September 2018

Citation identifier
https://pid.geoscience.gov.au/dataset/ga/122551

 
 

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N
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W


Keywords

marine seabed

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