Biological observations from the Discovery Investigations 1925-1952

OBIS and SWP OBIS

The Discovery Investigations were a series of expeditions to the Southern Oceans funded out of proceeds from the sale of whaling licenses that took place between 1925 and 1951. The investigations had three main components: a marine laboratory at King Edward Point on South Georgia; the fast-sailing 326-ton RRS William Scoresby; and studies undertaken by the RSS Discovery. In 1929, the Discovery was replaced by the 1000-ton steel-hulled RRS Discovery II when the older ship was found to be simply too slow and cumbersome to carry out all the work required.
A variety of sampling methods were deployed, including otter trawls, beam trawls, dredges, fish traps, and a variety of fine-meshed nets tow in the horizontal, vertical, or oblique.

N/A

This dataset was downloaded from OBIS (https://obis.org/). The records for only marine mammals, seabirds, sea turtles and rays and sharks were extracted. Records with no longitude/latitude or no date (eventDate) were excluded.
OBIS dataset page:
https://obis.org/dataset/364e5a12-8028-4329-be50-fc548c2d6ce4
Data Provider's dataset page:
https://nzobisipt.niwa.co.nz/resource?r=discovery_reports

Overview

This section explains attributes included in the original dataset. OBIS-SEAMAP restricts the attributes available to the public to date/time, lat/lon and species names/counts only. Should you need other attributes described here, you are encouraged to contact the data provider.

Attributes described below represent those in the original dataset provided by the provider.
All attributes are included in the downloadable file (CSV or ESRI File Geodatabase) for "Complete Set of Dataset".

Attributes in dataset

Attribute (table column)	Description
oid	Internal ID
id	Record ID
dataset_id	Dataset ID
scientificname	Scientific name
vernacularname	Vernacular name
aphiaid	Aphia ID
taxonrank	taxononic rank
individualcount	Group size / individual count
eventdate	Event date (precision varies)
eventtime	Event time
decimallatitude	Latitude in decimal degrees
decimallongitude	Longitude in decimal degrees
coordinateprecision	Coordinate precision
catalognumber	Catalog number
collectioncode	Collection code
occurrencestatus	Occurrence status
basisofrecord	Basis of record (HumanObservation / MachineObservation)
modified	Date/time the record was modified
node_id	Node ID
occurrenceid	Occurrence ID
occurrenceremarks	Occurrence remarks
eventid	Event ID
institutioncode	Institution code
lifestage	Life stage
sex	Gender of the animal if known
species	Species by provider
datasetid	Dataset ID by provider
country	Country
locality	Location of ocean
waterbody	Details of ocean
dropped	Flag indicating the record was dropped (always false)
absence	Flag indicating the record represents the absence of the species (always false)
marine	Flag indicating the record is for marine life (always true)