IMIS - Marine Research Groups

The dataset comprises a total of 328 distributional records, each one corresponding to a voucher specimen stored at the Italian National Antarctic Museum (MNA) – Genoa section. These records originate from the sampling activities performed in the context of eleven different research projects that took place during 11 scientific polar expeditions conducted in the Ross Sea and the Antarctic Peninsula. In total, 89 different sampling events were conducted using a variety of sampling instruments and methodologies. The diversity in the scientific goals of each different research project do not allow to provide a quantitative dataset, also considering that many occurrences were gathered as by-catch, still providing basic metadata such as the geographic coordinates, sampling depth and date and a general description of the adopted sampling methodology. For this reason, this resource must be considered exclusively as a contribution to the distributional knowledge of Antarctic Holothuroidea, especially for the Ross Sea, where most of the occurrences are located, and with a special focus on the Terra Nova Bay area.

This dataset is published by Italian National Antarctic Museum (MNA) under the license CC-BY 4.0. Please follow the guidelines from the SCAR Data Policy (SCAR, 2022) when using the data. If you have any questions regarding this dataset, please contact us via the contact information provided in the metadata or via data-biodiversity-aq@naturalsciences.be. Issues with dataset can be reported at https://github.com/biodiversity-aq/data-publication/

The occurrences presented in this dataset originated from a multitude of different Antarctic projects funded by the Italian National Antarctic Research Program (PNRA) and one from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI). The publication of this data paper was funded by the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO, contract n°FR/36/AN1/AntaBIS) in the Framework of EU-Lifewatch as a contribution to the SCAR Antarctic biodiversity portal (biodiversity.aq)