 |
 Marine Environmental Sciences Program |
| |
Marine Environmental Sciences Program |
| Introduction Organization of the data from the project Structure of data files Species names Format of data files Catalogue of available data files List of participants Bibliography Excerpt from Executive Summary (long) Site Maps |
 Oil covering seaward edge of the
reef flat and black oil slicks offshore at the Galeta Marine
Laboratory. |
In April, 1986 a
major oil spill polluted an area of coral reefs, mangrove forests, and
grassbeds along the Caribbean coast of the Republic of Panama. The area
affected included a biological reserve of the Smithsonian Tropical
Research Institute (STRI) where baseline biological and environmental
data had been collected for the previous 15 years. Shortly after the
spill, a grant to study the effects of the spill was received from the Minerals Management Service of the United
States Department of the Interior. Data was then collected from May of
1986 to October of 1991 and the results of the study were published as a technical report and as an executive summary of the MMS.
The final report contains the documentation of the collection methods for the files submitted here. In some cases however, this document contains additional documentation for particular files, otherwise most of the documentation was taken from a late draft of the final report. The excerpted parts are indicated with quotation marks, the other documentation was written by Karl Kaufmann, the data manager for the project.
The study was carried out by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute under Minerals Management Service contracts 14-12-0001-30355 and 14-12-0001-30393. All of the data collected under this contract is presented here. It is also available from the National Oceanographic Data Center (Accession # 9400033).
The study continued in part for an additional year under another grant, but that data is not included, nor is data collected before the spill or data collected by the STRI ESP program (such as the urchin data from Galeta). Most of the data on the chemistry of the oil are presented in tables in the final report and are not available in digital format.
Each sub-project has a three letter code, called the study ID (SID) which forms the first three letters of each file pertaining to it. Each subproject has up to 16 different sets of data, and each of these sets is assigned a single letter which is used for the fourth letter in each file name. Most of the files have the characters '_M' for the next two letters, indicating that it is the main data file for that data set. Files with three initial letters and ending with "_S" contain the species list for that subproject.
In the following discussion, columns in a table are referred to as
"fields" and rows are referred to as "records" in accordance to the
convention used by Dbase.
Much of the data was collected on a regular schedule, monthly to
yearly. Each time a collection of data was made, corresponding to a
particular month, quarter, or year, it was assigned a collection ID
(CID), unique to that particular data set. For example, if quarterly
samples are taken, but it takes a week to do all the sampling, then all
the samples taken during that week were given the same CID. These
numbers are sequential, but may not necessarily start at 1, and some
numbers may be skipped for various reasons.
Each site was assigned a unique 4 letter acronym which is listed in
Table 1.4 of the final report. Site maps can be found in the final
report in the chapter pertaining to each subproject.
Missing data is indicated by a -1 for a numeric field or a blank for a character field, unless otherwise indicated. Logical fields are all false by default. If an animal was specifically looked for and not found, it is entered as 0 in the appropriate place. Usually, however, animals which were not found and censused were not written on the data sheet and not entered in the file. Whether or not it was actually present in the sample depends on the thoroughness and purpose of the sampling method. However, if none of the target organisms were recorded in a given sample, at least something is entered, even if it is a name such as 'empty' to record the fact that that quadrat, core, root, etc, was sampled.
Care must be taken when doing a crosstabulation to distinguish between cells with no data and cells where the total count in the cell is 0. For example, if a crosstabulation is done to determine the total number of corals of a given species that were found at each of 12 sites for 5 different years, and a cell with a count of 0 results, it must be determined by some other method of analysis whether there were no corals of that species found or whether that site was not sampled in that year. Generally, a crosstab with a count of the number of samples will reveal if a site was not sampled, since there is always at least one entry for each sampling unit.
"GRS","O",17,"MH","19871008,"lren",,"",7.0255,8.4105,F
"GRS","O",217,"MH","19871008,"dont",,"",17.0431,16.6789,F
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