Data compilation of marine pelagic organism biomasses, swimming velocities, clearance and respiration rates

Jellyfishes have functionally replaced several overexploited commercial stocks of planktivorous fishes. This is paradoxical, because they use a primitive prey capture mechanism requiring direct contact with the prey, whereas fishes use more efficient visual detection. We have compiled published data to show that, in spite of their primitive life-style, jellyfishes exhibit similar instantaneous prey clearance and respiration rates as their fish competitors and similar potential for growth and reproduction. To achieve this production, they have evolved large, water-laden bodies that increase prey contact rates. Although larger bodies are less efficient for swimming, optimization analysis reveals that large collectors are advantageous if they move through the water sufficiently slowly.

Paleoclimate reconstruction from Miocene macroflora in Kazakhstan compiled from various publications

25 datasets (13 fossil leaf and pollen assemblages, 12 quantitative palaeoclimatic datasets) are provided in order to analyse Early Miocene palaeoclimate in Kazakhstan. The rich fossil record in Kazakhstan documents that during the Oligocene and Early Miocene this area in Central Eurasia was densely forested with warm-temperate deciduous trees and shrubs of the so-called "Turgayan flora". 29 fossil floras from 13 localities have been selected for a quantitative analysis of the Aquitanian (early Early Miocene) climate situation in Kazakhstan. The assessed mean annual temperatures generally place around 15 °C, while values of mean annual precipitation are of about 1000 mm. In combination with several other climate parameters estimated (temperatures of warmest and coldest months, precipitation rates of wettest, driest and warmest months), these data reflect uniform climatic conditions over several thousands of square kilometres. Data of temperature parameters show slight spatial differentiations, with generally cooler mean annual temperatures and higher seasonality (i.e. warmer summers and colder winters) in the north-eastern part of the study area compared with the south-western area around Lake Aral. As compared with palaeoclimate estimates for the European and East Asian Aquitanian, the central part of the Eurasian continent reveals evident signals of higher seasonality and slightly increased continentality.

Machinery's data sheet series

"compiled from Machinery's monthly data sheets and arranged with explanatory notes."

The HIPASS catalogue - I. Data presentation

The H I Parkes All-Sky Survey (HIPASS) catalogue forms the largest uniform catalogue of H I sources compiled to date, with 4315 sources identified purely by their H I content. The catalogue data comprise the southern region delta < + 2&DEG; of HIPASS, the first blind H I survey to cover the entire southern sky. The rms noise for this survey is 13 mJy beam(-1) and the velocity range is -1280 to 12 700 km s(-1). Data search, verification and parametrization methods are discussed along with a description of measured quantities. Full catalogue data are made available to the astronomical community including positions, velocities, velocity widths, integrated fluxes and peak flux densities. Also available are on-sky moment maps, position-velocity moment maps and spectra of catalogue sources. A number of local large-scale features are observed in the space distribution of sources, including the super-Galactic plane and the Local Void. Notably, large-scale structure is seen at low Galactic latitudes, a region normally obscured at optical wavelengths.

Review of tropospheric bomb C-14 data for carbon cycle modeling and age calibration purposes

Comprehensive published radiocarbon data from selected atmospheric records, tree rings, and recent organic matter were analyzed and grouped into 4 different zones (three for the Northern Hemisphere and one for the whole Southern Hemisphere). These C-14 data for the summer season of each hemisphere were employed to construct zonal, hemispheric, and global data sets for use in regional and global carbon model calculations including calibrating and comparing carbon cycle models. In addition, extended monthly atmospheric C-14 data sets for 4 different zones were compiled for age calibration purposes. This is the first time these data sets were constructed to facilitate the dating of recent organic material using the bomb C-14 curves. The distribution of bomb C-14 reflects the major zones of atmospheric circulation.

On stopwords, filtering and data sparsity for sentiment analysis of Twitter

Sentiment classification over Twitter is usually affected by the noisy nature (abbreviations, irregular forms) of tweets data. A popular procedure to reduce the noise of textual data is to remove stopwords by using pre-compiled stopword lists or more sophisticated methods for dynamic stopword identification. However, the effectiveness of removing stopwords in the context of Twitter sentiment classification has been debated in the last few years. In this paper we investigate whether removing stopwords helps or hampers the effectiveness of Twitter sentiment classification methods. To this end, we apply six different stopword identification methods to Twitter data from six different datasets and observe how removing stopwords affects two well-known supervised sentiment classification methods. We assess the impact of removing stopwords by observing fluctuations on the level of data sparsity, the size of the classifier's feature space and its classification performance. Our results show that using pre-compiled lists of stopwords negatively impacts the performance of Twitter sentiment classification approaches. On the other hand, the dynamic generation of stopword lists, by removing those infrequent terms appearing only once in the corpus, appears to be the optimal method to maintaining a high classification performance while reducing the data sparsity and substantially shrinking the feature space

Compilation of downward flux observations from sediment trap deployments in the Atlantic Ocean - Contribution to EURO-BASIN's Data integration

We provide a compilation of downward fluxes (total mass, POC, PON, BSiO2, CaCO3, PIC and lithogenic/terrigenous fluxes) from over 6000 sediment trap measurements distributed in the Atlantic Ocean, from 30 degree North to 49 degree South, and covering the period 1982-2011. Data from the Mediterranean Sea are also included. Data were compiled from different sources: data repositories (BCO-DMO, PANGAEA), time series sites (BATS, CARIACO), published scientific papers and/or personal communications from PI's. All sources are specifed in the data set. Data from the World Ocean Atlas 2009 were extracted to provide each flux observation with contextual environmental data, such as temperature, salinity, oxygen (concentration, AOU and percentage saturation), nitrate, phosphate and silicate.

Compilation of maximum ingestion and maximum clearance rate data for marine pelagic organisms

The metabolic rate of organisms may either be viewed as a basic property from which other vital rates and many ecological patterns emerge and that follows a universal allometric mass scaling law; or it may be considered a property of the organism that emerges as a result of the organism's adaptation to the environment, with consequently less universal mass scaling properties. Data on body mass, maximum ingestion and clearance rates, respiration rates and maximum growth rates of animals living in the ocean epipelagic were compiled from the literature, mainly from original papers but also from previous compilations by other authors. Data were read from tables or digitized from graphs. Only measurements made on individuals of know size, or groups of individuals of similar and known size were included. We show that clearance and respiration rates have life-form-dependent allometries that have similar scaling but different elevations, such that the mass-specific rates converge on a rather narrow size-independent range. In contrast, ingestion and growth rates follow a near-universal taxa-independent ~3/4 mass scaling power law. We argue that the declining mass-specific clearance rates with size within taxa is related to the inherent decrease in feeding efficiency of any particular feeding mode. The transitions between feeding mode and simultaneous transitions in clearance and respiration rates may then represent adaptations to the food environment and be the result of the optimization of tradeoffs that allow sufficient feeding and growth rates to balance mortality.

Compilation of respiration rate data for marine pelagic organisms

The metabolic rate of organisms may either be viewed as a basic property from which other vital rates and many ecological patterns emerge and that follows a universal allometric mass scaling law; or it may be considered a property of the organism that emerges as a result of the organism's adaptation to the environment, with consequently less universal mass scaling properties. Data on body mass, maximum ingestion and clearance rates, respiration rates and maximum growth rates of animals living in the ocean epipelagic were compiled from the literature, mainly from original papers but also from previous compilations by other authors. Data were read from tables or digitized from graphs. Only measurements made on individuals of know size, or groups of individuals of similar and known size were included. We show that clearance and respiration rates have life-form-dependent allometries that have similar scaling but different elevations, such that the mass-specific rates converge on a rather narrow size-independent range. In contrast, ingestion and growth rates follow a near-universal taxa-independent ~3/4 mass scaling power law. We argue that the declining mass-specific clearance rates with size within taxa is related to the inherent decrease in feeding efficiency of any particular feeding mode. The transitions between feeding mode and simultaneous transitions in clearance and respiration rates may then represent adaptations to the food environment and be the result of the optimization of tradeoffs that allow sufficient feeding and growth rates to balance mortality.

Spatially explicit estimates of stock size, structure and biomass of North Atlantic albacore tuna (Thunnus alalunga) in the North Atlantic for the period 1956-2010, compiled from the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas

The development of the ecosystem approach and models for the management of ocean marine resources requires easy access to standard validated datasets of historical catch data for the main exploited species. They are used to measure the impact of biomass removal by fisheries and to evaluate the models skills, while the use of standard dataset facilitates models inter-comparison. North Atlantic albacore tuna is exploited all year round by longline and in summer and autumn by surface fisheries and fishery statistics compiled by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). Catch and effort with geographical coordinates at monthly spatial resolution of 1° or 5° squares were extracted for this species with a careful definition of fisheries and data screening. In total, thirteen fisheries were defined for the period 1956-2010, with fishing gears longline, troll, mid-water trawl and bait fishing. However, the spatialized catch effort data available in ICCAT database represent a fraction of the entire total catch. Length frequencies of catch were also extracted according to the definition of fisheries above for the period 1956-2010 with a quarterly temporal resolution and spatial resolutions varying from 1°x 1° to 10°x 20°. The resolution used to measure the fish also varies with size-bins of 1, 2 or 5 cm (Fork Length). The screening of data allowed detecting inconsistencies with a relatively large number of samples larger than 150 cm while all studies on the growth of albacore suggest that fish rarely grow up over 130 cm. Therefore, a threshold value of 130 cm has been arbitrarily fixed and all length frequency data above this value removed from the original data set.

Data compilation of dinoflagellates growth rate, grazing rate and gross gowth efficiency from field and labratory experiments

The present data compilation includes dinoflagellates growth rate, grazing rate and gross growth efficiency determined either in the field or in laboratory experiments. From the existing literature, we synthesized all data that we could find on dinoflagellates. Some sources might be missing but none were purposefully ignored. We did not include autotrophic dinoflagellates in the database, but mixotrophic organisms may have been included. This is due to the large uncertainty about which taxa are mixotrophic, heterotrophic or symbiont bearing. Field data on microzooplankton grazing are mostly comprised of grazing rate using the dilution technique with a 24h incubation period. Laboratory grazing and growth data are focused on pelagic ciliates and heterotrophic dinoflagellates. The experiment measured grazing or growth as a function of prey concentration or at saturating prey concentration (maximal grazing rate). When considering every single data point available (each measured rate for a defined predator-prey pair and a certain prey concentration) there is a total of 801 data points for the dinoflagellates, counting experiments that measured growth and grazing simultaneously as 1 data point.

Compilation of growth rate data for marine pelagic organisms

The metabolic rate of organisms may either be viewed as a basic property from which other vital rates and many ecological patterns emerge and that follows a universal allometric mass scaling law; or it may be considered a property of the organism that emerges as a result of the organism's adaptation to the environment, with consequently less universal mass scaling properties. Data on body mass, maximum ingestion and clearance rates, respiration rates and maximum growth rates of animals living in the ocean epipelagic were compiled from the literature, mainly from original papers but also from previous compilations by other authors. Data were read from tables or digitized from graphs. Only measurements made on individuals of know size, or groups of individuals of similar and known size were included. We show that clearance and respiration rates have life-form-dependent allometries that have similar scaling but different elevations, such that the mass-specific rates converge on a rather narrow size-independent range. In contrast, ingestion and growth rates follow a near-universal taxa-independent ~3/4 mass scaling power law. We argue that the declining mass-specific clearance rates with size within taxa is related to the inherent decrease in feeding efficiency of any particular feeding mode. The transitions between feeding mode and simultaneous transitions in clearance and respiration rates may then represent adaptations to the food environment and be the result of the optimization of tradeoffs that allow sufficient feeding and growth rates to balance mortality.

A compilation of global bio-optical in situ data for ocean-colour satellite applications

A compiled set of in situ data is important to evaluate the quality of ocean-colour satellite-data records. Here we describe the data compiled for the validation of the ocean-colour products from the ESA Ocean Colour Climate Change Initiative (OC-CCI). The data were acquired from several sources (MOBY, BOUSSOLE, AERONET-OC, SeaBASS, NOMAD, MERMAID, AMT, ICES, HOT, GeP&CO), span between 1997 and 2012, and have a global distribution. Observations of the following variables were compiled: spectral remote-sensing reflectances, concentrations of chlorophyll a, spectral inherent optical properties and spectral diffuse attenuation coefficients. The data were from multi-project archives acquired via the open internet services or from individual projects, acquired directly from data providers. Methodologies were implemented for homogenisation, quality control and merging of all data. No changes were made to the original data, other than averaging of observations that were close in time and space, elimination of some points after quality control and conversion to a standard format. The final result is a merged table designed for validation of satellite-derived ocean-colour products and available in text format. Metadata of each in situ measurement (original source, cruise or experiment, principal investigator) were preserved throughout the work and made available in the final table. Using all the data in a validation exercise increases the number of matchups and enhances the representativeness of different marine regimes. By making available the metadata, it is also possible to analyse each set of data separately.

Data compilation of ciliates growth rate, grazing rate and gross gowth efficiency from field and labratory experiments

The present data compilation includes ciliates growth rate, grazing rate and gross growth efficiency determined either in the field or in laboratory experiments. From the existing literature, we synthesized all data that we could find on cilliate. Some sources might be missing but none were purposefully ignored. Field data on microzooplankton grazing are mostly comprised of grazing rate using the dilution technique with a 24h incubation period. Laboratory grazing and growth data are focused on pelagic ciliates and heterotrophic dinoflagellates. The experiment measured grazing or growth as a function of prey concentration or at saturating prey concentration (maximal grazing rate). When considering every single data point available (each measured rate for a defined predator-prey pair and a certain prey concentration) there is a total of 1485 data points for the ciliates, counting experiments that measured growth and grazing simultaneously as 1 data point.