Aquatic biodiversity records at The University of the South Pacific

Kelly Brown1, Peter Hughes1, Zelda Rafai1, Wai-Makare Sorby1, Abraham Waqairoba1, Kelly Brown2, Ainsof So'o3

1 The University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji; 2 ; 3 SPREP, Apia, Samoa

Corresponding author(s): Kelly Brown (kelly.brown@usp.ac.fj)Peter Hughes (hughespeter999@gmail.com)Zelda Rafai (zeldarafai@gmail.com)Wai-Makare Sorby (makaresorby.fj@gmail.com)Abraham Waqairoba (awaqairoba1998@gmail.com), Kelly Brown (kelly.brown@usp.ac.fj)

Received {date}; Revised {date}; Accepted {date}; Published {date}

Citation: Combination of authors, year of data paper publication (in parentheses), Title, Journal Name, Volume, Issue number (in parentheses), and doi of the data paper.

Abstract

This dataset contains occurrence records for specimens held by the Marine Collection, an aquatic natural history collection, at The University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji.
A large component of records are from Fiji, however, there are records from different South Pacific island countries. Marine biodiversity collections and recording started in the late 1960s and continues to the present day. Freshwater records started in the 2000s and this database grows annually.
Records before the year 2000 do not have GPS coordinates, however, locality descriptions are provided. A future georeferencing project is planned to address this.
Data mobilisation is supported by the BID Pacific project "Mobilizing biodiversity data from natural history collections in Fiji" (BID-PA-2020-006-NAC), and the British Academy funded Youth Futures project "(Re)Defining Culture: Engaging urban Fijian youth in sustainable employment opportunities in the cultural heritage sector (YF\190078).
This dataset will be updated regularly.

Keywords: Occurrence, Marine, Freshwater, Specimen

Project details

Project title: Mobilizing biodiversity data from natural history collections in Fiji
Personnel: Kelly Brown, Marika Tuiwawa, Mereia Tabua, Yumiko Baba
Funding: Data mobilisation was supported by the BID Pacific project "Mobilizing biodiversity data from natural history collections in Fiji" (BID-PA-2020-006-NAC), and the British Academy funded Youth Futures project "(Re)Defining Culture: Engaging urban Fijian youth in sustainable employment opportunities in the cultural heritage sector (YF\190078).
Study area descriptions/descriptor: Fiji and the South Pacific region.
Design description: Records were mobilised from the USP Marine Collection catalouge books. Taxonomic verification was carried out on OpenRefine using:
Sistema de Información Sobre Biodiversidad de Colombia -SiB Colombia (2019). Biodiversity data quality Scripts in Open Refine (Version 1.0)[code]. https://github.com/SIB-Colombia/data-quality-open-refine/

Data published through GBIF: https://ipt.sprep.org/resource?r=usp_ms_collection

Taxonomic coverage

Taxonomic ranks
Phylum: Arthropoda, Chordata, Cnidaria, Mollusca, Platyhelminthes, Porifera, Foraminifera, Echinodermata, Annelida

Spatial coverage

General spatial coverage: Coverage is mainly from Fiji, however, there are records from the South Pacific region included in this dataset.
Coordinates: 39°54'36''S and 2°48'39.6''S Latitude; 129°22'30''W and 137°48'43.2''E Longitude 

Temporal coverage: January 1, 1968 - December 31, 2020

Datasets

Dataset description
Object name: Darwin Core Archive Aquatic biodiversity records at The University of the South Pacific
Character encoding: UTF-8
Format name: Darwin Core Archive format
Format version: 1.0
Distribution: https://ipt.sprep.org/archive.do?r=usp_ms_collection
Publication date of data: 2023-06-30
Language: English
Licences of use: Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC) 4.0 License

Metadata language: English
Date of metadata creation: 2022-02-18
Hierarchy level: Dataset