Wednesday 24 August 2005

B2
1550-1705 hours

323
Seamounts: developing research on a global scale
Clark, Malcolm¹, Rowden, Ashley¹, Stocks, Karen²
1 NIWA, Wellington, New Zealand
2 San Diego Supercomputer Centre, San Diego, USA
Author email: m.clark@niwa.co.nz
Seamounts are prominent features of the world's underwater topography, with potentially up to 100,000 over 1 km high and many more of smaller elevation. Seamounts can support high biodiversity and special biological communities, are often highly productive ecosystems, and the focus of important commercial fisheries. However, on a global scale their biodiversity is poorly known. CenSeam (A global Census of Marine Life on Seamounts) is a new COML programme that started this year. It is intended to provide the framework needed to prioritize, integrate, expand, and facilitate seamount research efforts in order to increase our knowledge and build towards a global understanding of seamount ecosystems. Three main themes are the focus of the science plan (1) What factors drive seamount community structure, diversity, and endemism, both at the scale of whole seamounts and individual habitats within seamounts? (2) What key processes operate to cause differences between seamounts, and between seamount and non-seamount regions? (3) What are the impacts of fisheries on seamount community structure and function? National research programmes that contribute to CenSeam are utilizing a wide range of new technologies to gather data and bring together geological, oceanographic, and biological components of seamount habitats. In this presentation I will cover a number that are being applied to seamounts. These include multi-beam swath mapping, remote sensing of aspects of biological oceanography (e.g. surface productivity), and a variety of techniques to sample the physical substrate, seafloor and water column chemistry, and biology. The latter include standard fish trawls, benthic grabs, epibenthic sleds, dredges, but are increasingly being added to by data from rov's, auv's, and manned submersibles. No tool by itself provides all the answers, but in combination they provide extensive data which are rapidly improving our knowledge and reducing the unknown.

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