CV20027 NUI Galway Undergrads Training Survey

Six stations to be completed.

Two Teams with alternating duties from stations 1 to 5.

Station 1-5 will focus on Oceanographic data collection and sampling

and,

Sediment sampling for geophysics and fauna.

Station six will be a beam trawl tow with catch divided for alternating fisheries and benthic practicals.

1. Master Log
2. Oceanography Log
3. Geophysical Sediment Data Sheet
4. Core Sampling Sheet
5. Benthic Macrofauna Data Sheet
6. Fisheries Species Data Sheet
7. Fisheries Catch Numbers at Length

Benthic Megafauna Data Sheet

Most require Cruise Code i.e CV20027, Date, Time, Latitude and Longtitude, Depth, Sea state, Wind Direction and Speed which is on the Data Screen

If you don't log this your data is at worst useless and at best a lot more work to interpret and present.

Log every station and every sampling activity at that station. This is going to be the master table in your report.

 Data for the Conductivity Temperature and Depth ( CTD ),  Secchi , &  Vertical Plankton Haul 

This provides a physical description of the sediments at every station and ground truths  MBES  acoustic interpretations of the seabed.

The sheet derives from the  INFOMAR Ground Truthing and Sampling Strategy  document.

We’ll use section 4.5 as our guide to completing it.

For colour description we’ll use the  Munsell Colour matching system .

Download the  Munsel color chart app  from Playstore.

Corers penetrate deeper into sediments than grabs. Deck equipment includes a 2m    gravity corer  and a  Reineck Box Corer .

This sheet provides a field description of the structure and composition of the core sample. 

Further investigations and subsampling of stata of the core takes place onshore.

This log sheet is from the  INFOMAR Ground Truthing and Sampling Strategy  document.

This data sheet is also from the  INFOMAR Ground Truthing and Sampling Strategy .

We’ll be using section 4.7 as our guide for completing it. We’re sampling macrobenthos and  this video shows how .  

This sheet will capture all temporal and spatial data for the beam trawl tow.

The species field requires we identify as many species as possible and distribute and count them as cm size categories.

This data can be used to estimate Shannon-Wiener Index values for species richness.

This video shows the  Beam Trawl  on the Celtic Voyager.

We separate the fish in the beam trawl catch into different species. Each species gets its own tray and is weighed and logged here.

Species weight is the total weight for that species. If we have to subsample thats the sample weight.

Fish have already been sorted into species and each species weighed (by you!)

Pick a species (start with the most numerous).

Establish the range of the data by picking out and measuring the smallest and biggest individuals in the sample with a  measuring board . 

The length column is organised into 10cm boxes. If the smallest fish is 24cm and the largest is 44cm the first zero in the length column becomes 20cm, the second 30cm, the fourth 40cm. 

Each cell represents 1 cm. When we measure we round the length down to the nearest cm and assign each fish to a 1cm size category. Each measured fish becomes a  tally mark  in it's size category row. 

Thank you for engaging with this presentation!

 SMARTSeaSchool  research vessel training surveys happen because of the commitment and generosity of our partners:

 Marine Institute 

 Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology 

 NUI Galway 

 University College Cork 

 Maynooth University 

 INFOMAR 

 Geological Survey of Ireland 

For more information on SMART training programmes and to comment on this storymap please email smart@gmit.ie

More storymaps:

 Celtic Voyager Basics 

 Celtic Voyager Joining Instructions 

 SMARTSEASCHOOL Galway Bay Training Area 

 SMARTSEASCHOOL Cork Harbour Training Area