Depth to sea floor and sea ice thickness data measured at various locations around the Vestfold Hills, Davis station, East Antarctica, during the 2018-19 austral summer. Depth to sea floor and sea ice thickness measures in meters obtained using a weighted tape measure deployed through a hole (5 cm) drilled in the sea ice. Sea ice thickness was determined by snagging the weight on the underside edge of the ice hole as the tape measure was retreived.

Results from a February 2007 survey of the Vestfold Hills coastline and offshore islands for used and disused southern elephant seal wallows. The data here are point locations of the wallows, not the extents or boundaries of the wallows. The table below gives the coordinates (decimal degrees) for the elephant seal wallows found, their unofficial names and the wallow status as used or disused at the time of survey. Data were used in the 2018 Vestfold Hills/Davis Station Helicopter map: Wallow name Latitude Longitude Status Hawker Island -68.637360 77.840040 Used Hawker Island -68.634950 77.841310 Used Hawker Island -68.632180 77.841560 Used Mule Island -68.647860 77.825900 Unused Mule Island -68.646650 77.823920 Unused Zappert Point -68.505100 78.081020 Unused Old Wallow -68.598345 77.937185 Used Davis beach -68.577926 77.967032 Used Heidemann Bay -68.592067 77.945325 Used North of station -68.571916 77.971011 Used

This metadata record contains an Excel file containing total petroleum hydrocarbon data from analysis of marine sediments collected at Davis Station from December 2009 to March 2010. Refer to the Davis STP reports lodged under metadata record Davis_STP for the full Davis Sewage Treatment Project methods and result details. Davis STP - Total petroleum hydrocarbons Hydrocarbons were extracted from a 10g sub-sample of homogenised wet soil by tumbling overnight with a mixture of 10 mL of deionised water, 10 mL of dichlormethane (DCM), and 1 mL of DCM spiked with internal standards: 254 mg/L bromoeicosane; 55.2 mg/L 1,4 dichlorobenzene; 51.2 mg/L p-terphenyl; 52.2 mg/L tetracosane-d50; and 255 mg/L cyclo-octane. Samples were then centrifuged for 5 minutes at 1000 rpm, this was repeated a further 3 times to ensure complete separation of the organic and aqueous fractions. The DCM fraction was then extracted and placed into GC-vials. Extracts were analysed for total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) by gas chromatography using flame ionisation detection (GC-FID; Agilent 6890N with a split/splitless injector) and an auto-sampler (Agilent 7683 ALS). Separation was achieved using an SGE BP1 column (25 m x 0.22 mm ID, 0.25 µm film thickness). 1 µL of extract was injected (5:1 pulsed split) at 310° C and 17.7 psi of helium carrier gas. After 1.3 minutes, the carrier gas pressure was adjusted to maintain constant flow at 3.0 mL/min for the duration of the oven program. The oven temperature program was started at 36 °C (held for 3 minutes) and increased to 320 °C at 18 °C/min. Detector temperature was 330 °C. TPH concentrations were determined using a calibration curve, generated from standard solutions of special Antarctic blend diesel (SAB), and standard diesel. TPH was measured using the ratio of the total detector response of all hydrocarbons to the internal standard peak response. List of compounds analysed - C8-C28 individual hydrocarbon components - Naphthalene - Biomarkers (phytanes) - Total signal and area, and resolved compounds from C8 to C40, over specific ranges (e.g. C9-C18, SAB) Reporting limit - 0.3 mg.kg-1 on a dry matter basis (DMB) for individual components - 2.5-160 mg.kg-1 on a dry matter basis (DMB) for various calculated ranges Analytical uncertainty - Analytical precision: (a) 3 samples extracted and analysed in triplicate, (b) 3 extracts analysed by GC-FID in duplicate; only 1 of each set greater than RL (160): (a) RSD = 2%, (b) RSD = 0.4% - Site heterogeneity: reproducibility (RSD) of mean data from site replicate samples (mostly duplicates) was 24% (mean, SD 20%, range 4-60%, n=8) - From the limited data on reproducibility summarised above, it can be concluded that site heterogeneity contributes most to the uncertainty of the TPH data for the site locations. Background of the Davis STP project Refer to the Davis STP reports lodged under metadata record Davis_STP.

Geoscience Australia, the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) and the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) conducted a hydrographic and seafloor characterisation survey in nearshore waters offshore from Davis Station in the Australian Antarctic Territory. Multibeam bathymetry data was acquired during January-February 2017 and a high-resolution (2 m) bathymetry grid produced for the survey area.

The date are of the highest amplitudes across the frequency range of Weddell seal tonal trills (an underwater call made by males). Each column presents the results of a frequency amplitude measure that is relative to the highest amplitude of that trill, independent of the frequency at which that amplitude occurs. This removes the influence of the overall amplitude of the call which is influence of the distance the sea was from the hydrophone when the recording was made. Four trill patterns were identified (A - D) and a number of trills not included in the analyses are classed as type X. The X call types were excluded because the original recording was later found to be overloaded or partly masked by ice noises or the calls of another seal. Analysis details are included in the accompanying manuscript. The accompanying Excel file contain the frequency amplitude measurements of individual trills at two location groups: the Aurora Truning location at the anchorage location of the Aurora Australis near Davis and the other group is a number of breeding groups in the Vestfold Hills. Variable A is the frequency in Hz, Variables B to DH at the Aurora Turning location and B to BY at the Davis locations are data from individual trills. Rows 2 or 3 indicate the four Trill patterns, A, B, C or D, with an X designation for trills that were not included in the analyses due to limited frequency ranges or overloading of the original recordings (that was discovered later in the analyses). ssize or samplesize is the number of trills that were at each frequency bin.

Geoscience Australia, the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) and the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) conducted a hydrographic and seafloor characterisation survey in nearshore waters offshore from Davis Station in the Australian Antarctic Territory. Multibeam data was acquired during January-February 2017 and a high-resolution (2 m) backscatter grid produced for the survey area.

Our aim was to compare water and sediment as sources of environmental DNA (eDNA) to better characterise Antarctic benthic communities and further develop practical approaches for DNA-based biodiversity assessment in remote environments. We used a cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) metabarcoding approach to characterise metazoan communities in 26 nearshore sites across 12 locations (including Ellis Fjord, Warriner Channel, Hawker Channel, Abatus Bay, Powell Point, Shirokaya Bay, and Weddell Arm) in the Vestfold Hills (East Antarctica) based on DNA extracted from either sediment cores or filtered seawater. We detected a total of 99 metazoan species from 12 phyla (including nematodes, cnidaria, echinoderms, chordates, arthropods, annelids, rotifers and molluscs) across 26 sites, with similar numbers of species detected in sediment and water eDNA samples. Please cite: Clarke LJ et al. (2021). Environmental DNA metabarcoding for monitoring metazoan biodiversity in Antarctic nearshore ecosystems. PeerJ, DOI: 10.7717/peerj.12458 This work was completed as part of the Davis Aerodrome Project (DAP).

The Retrospective Analysis of Antarctic Tracking Data (RAATD) is a Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research (SCAR) project led jointly by the Expert Groups on Birds and Marine Mammals and Antarctic Biodiversity Informatics, and endorsed by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. The RAATD project team consolidated tracking data for multiple species of Antarctic meso- and top-predators to identify Areas of Ecological Significance. These datasets constitute the compiled tracking data from a large number of research groups that have worked in the Antarctic since the 1990s. This metadata record pertains to the "filtered" version of the data files. These files contain position estimates that have been processed using a state-space model in order to estimate locations at regular time intervals. For technical details of the filtering process, consult the data paper. The filtering code can be found in the https://github.com/SCAR/RAATD repository. This data set comprises one metadata csv file that describes all deployments, along with data files (3 files for each of 17 species). For each species there is: - an RDS file that contains the fitted filter model object and model predictions (this file is RDS format that can be read by the R statistical software package) - a PDF file that shows the quality control results for each individual model - a CSV file containing the interpolated position estimates For details of the file contents and formats, consult the data paper. The data are also available in a standardized version (see https://data.aad.gov.au/metadata/records/SCAR_EGBAMM_RAATD_2018_Standardised) that contain position estimates as provided by the original data collectors (generally, raw Argos or GPS locations, or estimated GLS locations) without state-space filtering.

The Retrospective Analysis of Antarctic Tracking Data (RAATD) is a Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research (SCAR) project led jointly by the Expert Groups on Birds and Marine Mammals and Antarctic Biodiversity Informatics, and endorsed by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. The RAATD project team consolidated tracking data for multiple species of Antarctic meso- and top-predators to identify Areas of Ecological Significance. These datasets constitute the compiled tracking data from a large number of research groups that have worked in the Antarctic since the 1990s. This metadata record pertains to the "standardized" version of the data files. These files contain position estimates as provided by the original data collectors (generally, raw Argos or GPS locations, or estimated GLS locations). Original data files have been converted to a common format and quality-checking applied, but have not been further filtered or interpolated. Periods at the start or end of deployments were identified and discarded if there was evidence that location data during these periods did not represent the animals' at-sea movement. For example, tags may have been turned on early (thereby recording locations prior to their deployment on animals) or animals may have remained at the deployment site, e.g. the breeding colony, for an extended period at the start or end of the tag deployment. Some tracks also showed a marked deterioration in the frequency and quality (for PTTs) of location estimates near the end of a track. Such locations were visually identified based on maps of each track in conjunction with plots of location distance from deployment site against time. This information is captured in the location_to_keep column appended to each species’ data file (1 = keep, 0 = discard). The code used to trim the tracks can be found in the https://github.com/SCAR/RAATD repository. This data set comprises one metadata csv file that describes all deployments, along with data csv files (17 files, one per species) containing the position data. For details of the file formats, consult the data paper. The data are also available in a filtered version (see https://data.aad.gov.au/metadata/records/SCAR_EGBAMM_RAATD_2018) that have been processed using a state-space model in order to estimate locations at regular time intervals.