The Census of Antarctic Marine Life: The First Available Baseline for Antarctic Marine Biodiversity

• Main Authors: SCHIAPARELLI, STEFANO, Danis B., Wadley V., Stoddart D. M.
• Other Authors: Verde C., Di Prisco G., Schiaparelli, Stefano, Danis, B., Wadley, V., Stoddart, D. M.
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Spinger Verlag 2012
• Subjects: Arctic; Antarctic; Arctic Ocean; Antarc*; Antarctica; International Polar Year; IPY
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11567/521531; https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27349-0_1

The Census of Antarctic Marine Life (CAML, www.caml.aq) was a 5-year long international project that focused the attention on the ice-bound oceans of Antarctica during the International Polar Year (IPY) in 2007–08, bringing together researchers from 30 different countries and more than 50 institutions. It was one of the fifteen IPY-endorsed biological projects devoted to Antarctica (Project #83) and coordinated field operations of 18 research voyages in Antarctica during IPY and/or within the CAML life-span. CAML’s main objectives were to study the evolution of life in Antarctic waters to determine how this had influenced the diversity of the present biota and to use these observations to predict how it might respond to future change. CAML was also one of the fourteen projects of the international Census of Marine Life (CoML, www.coml.org) (Gutt et al. 2010), each focusing on specific geographic environments or subject areas, with the aim to understand marine biodiversity and set reference baselines to allow measuring change. CAML’s sister project was the Arctic Ocean Diversity (ArcOD), devoted to the census of Arctic marine biodiversity. Thanks to strong interaction with this project, it is now possible to draw comparisons between differences in ecological structure and dynamics of the Arctic and Southern Oceans (Gradinger et al. 2010; Gutt et al. 2010).