Phytoplankton from the White Sea, Barents Sea, Norwegian Sea and Arctic Basin 1993-2003

Overview: 

This dataset describes the Arctic plankton species and diversity in a study area northwest of Russia, and was collected as part of the Arctic Ocean Diversity project.

Dataset Location: Dataset available from iOBIS.org (OBIS Resource ID 1559), and also from here, but the relevant link on this page is broken as of 29 April 2016.

Site Location: White Sea, Barents Sea, Norwegian Sea, Arctic Basin
 
Site(s) Georeferenced: Yes

Timespan: 1993 - 2003

Sampling Frequency: Samples collected multiple times per month for a variable number of months per year.

Data collection summary/Methods: Unknown

Data collected: Species counts

Known Issues: 1) Sampling is uneven across years. 2) The raw data downloaded from iOBIS.org have a "frameshift mutation" due to extra double quotes in the 'sauthor' field. For 1,174 records, the 'sauthor' value accidentally got split on a comma into both the 'sauthor' and 'tname' fields, shifting all subsequent fields one column to the right. The R code below fixes this issue.

rawdata = read.csv('raw_data_downloaded_from_OBIS.csv', header=T, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
rawdata$index = 1:nrow(rawdata)

# These data are formatted properly (there should be no value in the 'collector' field if there was no frameshift)
rawdata1 = rawdata[is.na(rawdata$collector),]

# These data need to be fixed (a column shift has resulted in non-NA values in that field)
rawdata2 = rawdata[!is.na(rawdata$collector),]

# Problematic fields are sauthor and tname; last two characters of tname are "", and these are removed
new_sauthor = paste(rawdata2$sauthor, ",", substring(rawdata2$tname, 1, nchar(rawdata2$tname)-2), sep = '')

fixeddata2 = cbind(rawdata2[, 1:19], new_sauthor, rawdata2[, 22:100])
names(fixeddata2) = names(rawdata)[c(1:98, 100)]

fixeddata = rbind(rawdata1[, c(1:98, 100)], fixeddata2)

# Put the fixed data back into the original order

fixeddata = fixeddata[order(fixeddata$index, decreasing = FALSE), 1:98]

 
Best Practices:
 
Conditions for use:

Citation/ Distributing Author:
 
Supplemental resources: There is no official data publication, although a few studies have made use of these data including:

 
Available via the EcoData Retriever: No

Submitted 8 years 7 months ago by Allen Hurlbert.
Last modified: 
2016