Appendix K – OSRI Grant Policy Manual Final Report Form - Oil Spill Recovery Institute An electronic copy of this report shall be submitted by mail, or e-mail to the OSRI Research Program Manager [email protected] and Financial Office [email protected] Mailing address: P.O. Box 705 - Cordova, AK 99574 - Deadline for this report: Submittal within 90 days of grant/award expiration. Also, note that a summary Financial Statement shall be submitted within 45 days of the grant expiration. The final invoice and financial statement is due within 90 days of the grant/award expiration. Today’s date: 15 April 2014 Name of awardee/grantee: Bodil Bluhm OSRI Contract Number: 11-10-14 Project title: Data rescue: Epibenthic invertebrates from the Beaufort Sea sampled during WEBSEC and OCS cruises in the 1970s Dates project began and ended: PART I - Outline for Final Program or Technical Report This report must be submitted by all grantees. However, for those whose project work resulted in a peer reviewed publication (whether in draft or final form), this report may be abbreviated and the publication attached as part of the report. A. Non-technical Abstract or summary of project work that does not exceed 2 pages and includes an overview of the project. This abstract should describe the nature and significance of the project. It may be provided to the Advisory Board and could be used by OSRI staff to answer inquiries as to the nature and significance of the project. This project sought to rescue data on epibenthic invertebrates and fish sampled by trawls and photographs in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea during Western Beaufort Sea Ecological Cruise (WEBSEC) and Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) surveys in the 1970s. The material included station locations and associated water depths, faunal distribution records, a taxonomic inventory and voucher material archived at museums. Recovering this historical information is valuable in order to assess biological responses to climatic changes and other stresses acting on or imminent in the marine Arctic. The epibenthic community is a useful faunal compartment to monitor in this respect because it serves as long-term integrators of climatic conditions due to the organisms’ long live spans (years to decades). Epibenthos also contributes to carbon recycling on Arctic shelves and slopes and provides food for marine mammals and birds. The historic data in question can form a reference point for the 1970’s for comparisons to current surveys in the Beaufort Sea that have been conducted since 2008. More specifically, this project had the following objectives: 1) To digitize geo-referenced faunal distribution records from maps and tables in reports into Excel format with metadata documentation; 2) to identify species of partly identified or unidentified voucher material archived at the National History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC); 3) to update the 1 Appendix K – OSRI Grant Policy Manual taxonomy used in the 1970s to today’s standard per the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS); 4) to make the faunal data publicly available through an open access online portal; 5) to integrate the taxonomic inventory into the Arctic Register of Marine Species (part of WoRMS); and 6) to create web-based species accounts of dominant taxa in the study area as the outreach component to this project. We were able to retrieve taxonomic lists and counts of all invertebrates and fishes collected in 22 trawl hauls from the WEBSEC 1972 survey. Geographic location information and water depths could also be compiled for these sites. The data set was comprised of 260 taxa of which 80% were resolved to the species level. The counts were done at the species level for dominant phyla, and at the phylum level for rare taxa. The overall inventory was dominated by arthropods (primarily crustaceans; 40%) and molluscs (24%). Twenty-four taxa were fishes. On a per haul basis, the number of epibenthic taxa per haul ranged from 2 to 63 and the number of fish species ranged from 1 to 9. Individuals caught per haul ranged from 2 to 6500 (but note that haul duration was variable). Densities could not be calculated because the area trawled was not recorded during the survey, but by relative composition of the numbers of individuals per haul, echinoderms and molluscs and arthropods were dominant at most sites. Hierarchical cluster analysis and non-metric multi-dimensional scaling ordination revealed that areas of faunal similarity were primarily comprised by stations distributed along depth contours. Beyond the station locations no data was found from the OCS surveys. The sparse information that could be reconciled from the photographic transects stemmed from original film rolls and prints that Dr. Carey had mailed to the project PI. Dominant taxa identified, with some confidence, from the sub-set of images that was in focus, include the gelatinous sea cucumber Myriotrochus rinkii, and the brittle stars Ophiocten sericeum (on the shelf) and Ophiopleura borealis (on the slope). The highest density estimate, based on a compass of known size visible in select photographs, was in the range of 150 brittle stars m-2. Such high densities have also been documented from other locations in the Pacific and European Arctic. Over 200 lots of brittle stars archived at NHMLAC were studied by echinoderm curator Dr. G. Hendler and reorganized to 444 lots of which 393 were of sufficient quality for identification to species level. A total of 17 taxa including 14 species were identified from the collection representing about 50% of the species currently known from the Arctic. The four species dominant in the collection, Ophiocten sericeum, Ophiopleura borealis, Ophiacantha bidentata, Ophiura sarsii made up 94% of the specimens in the lots. Dr. Philip Lambert, curator emeritus at the Royal British Columbia Museum studied 104 holothurian (sea cucumber) lots and found nine species. By far most common was Myriotrochus rinkii, a small gelatinous and transparent mud- dwelling sea cucumber that is still common in certain parts of the Beaufort Sea today. The second most common species was Psolus peronii, a hard-bottom preferring sea cucumber which we also encountered in relatively high numbers at some stations with coarse substrate in the US Beaufort Sea in recent years. Many other taxa were archived at NHMLAC and other museums, but those collections are not fully registered electronically, and our funds did not allow to study them all. Communication with various curators and collection managers, however, indicates that an interest in further work on this collection exists. The taxonomic inventory of the trawl fauna from this study and a list of Carey’s macrofauna work found in one of his reports (containing over 1000 species) were updated for their taxonomic names according to the World Register of Marine Species. Approximately 20% of the taxon names had either changed or been misspelled. The trawl data set has been archived at the Earth Observing Laboratory under the Pacific Marine Arctic Regional Synthesis portal that will be 2 Appendix K – OSRI Grant Policy Manual publicly available within the next year. Species accounts for 16 dominant echinoderm species of the Pacific Arctic have been prepared and will be available at www.arcodiv.org soon. The results of this study were presented in two posters at the Alaska Marine Science Symposium in Anchorage Alaska in 2013 and 2014. We conclude that data rescue efforts such as this project contribute critical pieces of information that can extend sparsely available Arctic biological time series back in time. B. Review objectives as described in original proposal and state whether these objectives were achieved. 1) Transform available data relating to trawl hauls and photographic transects from printed reports into digital format. The objective was achieved for the WEBSEC 1972 trawl hauls, i.e. the majority of trawls collected by Dr. Carey in the Beaufort Sea. Data for the OCS cruises and the photographic sampling apparently never appeared in reports. We were able to retrieve basin information from a subset of the original photographic material. 2) Process part of the unsorted or poorly identified voucher material archived at the National History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC). This objective was achieved by investigation of brittle star lots (Ophiuroidea) and sea cucumber lots (Holothuroidea) from Dr. Carey’s collections archived at NHMLAC. These groups represent two orders of Echinodermata, a phylum which is the often biomass-dominant within the epibenthos of Arctic shelves. The available funds did not allow sorting and identification of other taxa. 3) Update the taxonomy to today’s standard according to the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS; www.marinespecies.org). This objective was achieved by matching the retrieved taxonomic information to today’s taxonomy as accepted by WoRMS. 4) Make the data available to recognized open access online data bases. The data were archived to the open access online portal of the Earth Observatory Laboratory. 5) Integrate the taxonomic inventory into the Arctic Register of Marine Species (ARMS) (www.marinespecies.org/arms/) Bluhm has sent the taxonomic list to the ARMS administrators for integration. 6) For outreach, create electronic species pages of the dominant species to be posted at the Arctic Ocean Diversity web site and harvested by the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org). The materials for the species pages were created and submitted for posting on the ArcOD website at www.arcodiv.org. The timing of posting depends on time availability of the web coordinator which is more limited now since ArcOD funding ended. 3 Appendix K – OSRI Grant Policy Manual C. Describe problems or roadblocks encountered in project implementation. The challenge of the project was to find the pieces of relevant information, reconcile them and put them together to a coherent picture, as is perhaps true for many of these data rescue projects.