2017 - Chatham Rise biodiversity

Quantifying Benthic Biodiversity: a factual voyage report from RV Tangaroa voyage TAN1701 to Chatham Rise
4 January – 2 February 2017

Overview

The overall objective of project ZBD201611 is ‘to improve predictive models of seabed habitat, communities, and species across Chatham Rise’, with an initial specific objective to ‘collect quantitative data about seabed habitats and fauna by undertaking a survey of unsampled areas on Chatham Rise’.
To address Specific Objective 1, a benthic sampling programme for a twenty-seven day research voyage (TAN1701, 4 Jan - 2 Feb 2017), was developed with two primary objectives:

  1. To collect quantitative data on the composition and distribution of seabed habitats and fauna on Chatham Rise that can be used in conjunction with data from earlier surveys to improve the performance of, and reduce uncertainty associated with, models of habitat and faunal distributions.
  2. To re-survey the seabed sampling sites of De Leo et al., (2010) in Kaikōura Canyon

Click link below to read full voyage report: