Sea-floor images from ROV transects during POLARSTERN cruise ANT-XVII/3 (EASIZ III) to the Weddell Sea, Antarctica

• Main Authors: Gutt, Julian, Starmans, Andreas, Teixidó, Núria
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: PANGAEA 2010
• Subjects: ANT-XVII/3; Archive of Underwater Imaging; AUI; EASIZ; Ecology of the Antarctic Sea Ice Zone; FTS; Photo sledge; Polarstern; PS56/059-12; PS56/059-5; PS56/081-1; PS56/082-1; PS56/083-1; PS56/084-1; PS56/094-1; PS56/107-1; PS56/111-2; PS56/111-26; PS56/111-4; PS56/125-1; PS56/126-1; PS56/127-1; PS56/154-1; PS56/171-1; PS56/171-2; PS56/171-4; PS56/197-1; PS56 EASIZ III; Remote operated vehicle SPRINT 103; ROVS; Scotia Sea; Weddell Sea; Antarctic; The Antarctic; Weddell; Antarc*; Antarctica; Berichte zur Polar- und Meeresforschung; Reports on Polar and Marine Research; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.755490; https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.755490

Transects of a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) providing sea-bed videos and photographs were carried out during POLARSTERN expedition ANT-XVII/3 focussing on the ecology of benthic assemblages on the Antarctic shelf in the South-Eastern Weddell Sea. The ROV-system sprint 103 was equiped with two video- and one still camera, lights, flash-lights, compass, and parallel lasers providing a scale in the images, a tether-management system (TMS), a winch, and the board units. All cameras used the same main lense and could be tilted. Videos were recorded in Betacam-format and (film-)slides were made by decision of the scientific pilot. The latter were mainly made under the aspect to improve the identification of organisms depicted in the videos because the still photographs have a much higher optical resolution than the videos. In the photographs species larger than 3 mm, in the videos larger than 1 cm are recognisable and countable. Under optimum conditions the transects were strait; the speed and direction of the ROV were determined by the drift of the ship in the coastal current, since both, the ship and the ROV were used as a drifting system; the option to operate the vehicle actively was only used to avoide obstacles and to reach at best a distance of only approximately 30 cm to the sea-floor. As a consequence the width of the photographs in the foreground is approximately 50 cm. Deviations from this strategy resulted mainly from difficult ice- and weather conditions but also from high current velocity and local up-welling close to the sea-bed. The sea-bed images provide insights into the general composition of key species, higher systematic groups and ecological guilds. Within interdisciplinary approaches distributions of assemblages can be attributed to environmental conditions such as bathymetry, sediment characteristics, water masses and current regimes. The images also contain valuable information on how benthic species are associated to each other. Along the transects, small- to intermediate-scaled ...