In September 2006, twenty-three scientists from six countries attended an Experts Workshop on Bioregionalisation of the Southern Ocean held in Hobart, Australia. The workshop was hosted by the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre, and WWF-Australia, and sponsored by Antarctic expedition cruise operator, Peregrine Adventures. The workshop was designed to assist with the development of methods that might be used to partition the Southern Ocean for the purposes of large-scale ecological modelling, ecosystem-based management, and consideration of marine protected areas.

The aim of the workshop was to bring together scientific experts in their independent capacity to develop a 'proof of concept' for a broad-scale bioregionalisation of the Southern Ocean, using physical environmental data and satellite-measured chlorophyll concentration as the primary inputs.

Issues examined during the workshop included the choice of data and extraction of relevant parameters to best capture ecological properties, the use of data appropriate for end-user applications, and the relative utility of taking a hierarchical, non-hierarchical, or mixed approach to regionalisation. The final method involved the use of a clustering procedure to classify individual sites into groups that are similar to one another within a group, and reasonably dissimilar from one group to the next, according to a selected set of parameters (e.g. depth, ice coverage, temperature).

The workshop established a proof of concept for bioregionalisation of the Southern Ocean, demonstrating that this analysis can delineate bioregions that agree with expert opinion at the broad scale. Continuation of this work will be an important contribution to the achievement of a range of scientific, management and conservation objectives, including large-scale ecological modelling, ecosystem-based management and the development of an ecologically representative system of marine protected areas.

This metadata record provides links to the report from that workshop, the appendices to that report, and the ArcGIS files and Matlab code used during the workshop.

The report is in PDF format.

The Appendices to the report are in PDF format and contain:

Appendix 1: Approaches to bioregionalisation - examples presented during the workshop

Antarctic Environmental Domains Analysis

CCAMLR Small-Scale Management Units for the fishery Antarctic krill in the SW Atlantic

Australian National Bioregionalisation: Pelagic Regionalisation

Selecting Marine Protected Areas in New Zealand's EEZ

Appendix 2: Technical information on approach to bioregionalisation

Appendix 3: Descriptions of datasets used in the analysis

Appendix 4: Results of secondary regionalisation using ice and chlorophyll data

Appendix 5: Biological datasets of potential use in further bioregionalisation work

Appendix 6: Details of datasets, Matlab code and ArcGIS shapefiles included on the CD

The ArcGIS archive is in zip format and contains the shapefiles and other ArcGIS resources used to produce the figures in the report.

The Matlab archive is in zip format and contains the Matlab code and gridded data sets used during the workshop. See the readme.txt file in this archive for more information.

Description of datasets

Sea surface temperature (SST)

Mean annual sea surface temperatures were obtained from the NOAA Pathfinder satellite annual climatology (Casey and Cornillon 1999). This climatology was calculated over the period 1985-1997 on a global 9km grid. Monthly values were averaged to obtain an annual climatology.

Casey, K.S. and P. Cornillon (1999) A comparison of satellite and in situ based sea surface temperature climatologies, J. Climate, vol. 12, no. 6, pp. 1848-1863.

Bathymetry

Depth data were obtained from the GEBCO digital atlas (IOC, IHO and BODC, 2003). These data give water depth in metres and are provided on a 1-minute global grid. Centenary Edition of the GEBCO Digital Atlas, published on CD-ROM on behalf of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission and the International Hydrographic Organization as part of the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, British Oceanographic Data Centre, Liverpool, U.K. See

http://www.gebco.net and https://www.bodc.ac.uk/projects/data_management/international/gebco/

A metadata record can be obtained from:

http://data.aad.gov.au/aadc/metadata/metadata_redirect.cfm?md=AMD/AU/gebco_bathy_polygons

Nutrient concentrations

Silicate and nitrate concentrations were obtained from the WOCE global hydrographic climatology (Gouretski and Koltermann, 2004). This climatology provides oceanographic data on a 0.5 degree regular grid on a set of 45 standard levels covering the depth range from the sea surface to 6000m. The silicate and nitrate concentrations were calculated from seawater samples collected using bottles from stationary ships. The nutrient concentrations at the 200m depth level were used here; concentrations are expressed in micro mol/kg.

https://odv.awi.de/data/ocean/woce-global-hydrographic-climatology/

Gouretski, V.V., and K.P. Koltermann, 2004: WOCE Global Hydrographic Climatology. Technical Report, 35, Berichte des Bundesamtes fur Seeschifffahrt und Hydrographie.

Insolation (PAR)

The mean summer climatology of the photosynthetically-active radiation (PAR) at the ocean surface was obtained from satellite estimates (Frouin et al.). These PAR estimates are obtained from visible wavelengths and so are not available over cloud- or ice-covered water, or in low-light conditions including the austral winter. Hence in the sea ice zone, this climatology represents the average PAR calculated over the period for which the water was not ice-covered.

https://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi/l3

Robert Frouin, Bryan Franz, and Menghua Wang. Algorithm to estimate PAR from SeaWiFS data Version 1.2 - Documentation.

Chlorophyll-a

Mean summer surface chlorophyll-a concentrations were calculated from the SeaWiFS summer means. We used the mean of the 1998-2004 summer values. Chlorophyll concentrations are expressed in mg/m^3.

https://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi/l3

Sea ice

We calculated the mean fraction (0-1) of the year for which the ocean was covered by at least 15% sea ice. These calculations were based on satellite-derived estimates of sea ice concentration spanning 1979-2003.

http://nsidc.org/data/nsidc-0079.html

Comiso, J. (1999, updated 2005). Bootstrap sea ice concentrations for NIMBUS-7 SMMR and DMSP SSM/I. Boulder, CO, USA: National Snow and Ice Data Center. Digital media.

Southern Ocean Fronts

These are the front positions as published by Orsi et al. (1995).

Orsi A, Whitworth T, III, Nowlin WD, Jr (1995) On the meridional extent and fronts of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. Deep-Sea Research 42:641-673

Use of these data are governed by the following conditions:

1. The data are provided for non-commercial use only.

2. Any publication derived using the datasets should acknowledge the Australian Antarctic Data Centre as having provided the data and the original source (see the relevant metadata record listed in the description below for the proper citation).