Mapping marine biodiversity in the algae belt, Norway

Data Records

The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 57 records.

This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.

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The publisher and rights holder of this work is University of Oslo. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) License.

GBIF Registration

This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: 8151d1a3-662c-4ba4-860a-78da64253114.  University of Oslo publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by GBIF Norway.

Keywords

Occurrence; Specimen

Contacts

Torsten Hugo Struck

• Metadata Provider ●
• Originator ●
• User ●
• Point Of Contact

Professor

Natural History Museum, University of Oslo

Natural History Museum, P.O. Box 1172 Blindern

0318 Oslo

NO

t.h.struck@nhm.uio.no

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3280-6239

Geographic Coverage

Norway

Taxonomic Coverage

N/A

Temporal Coverage

Project Data

The marine algae belt comprising kelp forests, seagrass meadows and rocky reefs with coralline red seaweeds is one of the most active primary producing environments in the sea. It also harbors a great diversity of animals including sea squirts, ribbon worms, nick worms, serpulid worms, spionid worms and skeleton shrimps. The species of these groups occupy important ecological functions as herbivores, predators and filter feeding organisms and can be sessile or agile as well as solitary or colonial. Globally these taxa comprise more than 7,000 species with around 250 species documented from Norwegian waters. Despite this, the knowledge about their taxonomy and distribution in Norway is at best poor and in dire need of improvement. Specimens in museum collections are often quite old material, which additionally is often wrongly determined due to unresolved taxonomic issues including the high degree of cryptic species in these groups. Besides cryptic species, many of these taxa include invasive species causing among others high economic damage in aquaculture and ship transportation due to biofouling. This is why we conducted a field inventory and collected species of these taxa in Norway (from the Skagerrak up to Tromsø). With morphological and molecular methods, we determined the species and learned more about their distribution and their association with Norwegian nature types. We conducted three field trips and got several Bachelor students from UiO involved in our work. These efforts resulted into the record of 625 collection samples of 73 species from these animal groups and 43 localities in Viken, Trøndelag, Vestland, and Troms og Finnmark comprising 19 Norwegian nature types. Our results show that we have found 4 species, which new to Norway, and at least 9, which are new to science, but there may be 7 additional ones. Besides our target group, we also found several specimens of species of other groups in our samples and preserved them for future research and as a record to be stored in our scientific collections.

Additional Metadata