Southern Ocean pinnipeds provide bathymetric insights on the East Antarctic continental shelf

Brief description

These are seal dive data used in the paper "Southern Ocean pinnipeds provide bathymetric insights on the East Antarctic continental shelf"

The seal dive depths provide new ocean depth information from over 500,000 individual dives from 265 seals on the East Antarctica continental shelf. The seal tags have a post-processed position uncertainty of 2-3 km, and provide transmitted depth data with a resolution of 10-25 m. About 25% of these seal dives were, on average, 220 m (sometimes over 1000 m) deeper than the interpolated seafloor in the International Bathymetric Chart of the Southern Ocean Version 2

Each row is an individual dive collected by a SMRU CTD-SLDR and transmitted via system Argos. Max_depth is the maximum depth reached by the seal on that dive.

The lons and lats are estimates of the seals location at the end of that dive and were calculated using the AniMotum package in R, which uses a state Space Model to estimate a location for each dive. The uncertainty of these locations has been quantified to be a median error of 3.2 km (95th percentile = 12.1 km), relative to near-simultaneous GPS locations for the same seals (Jonsen, I. D. et al. A continuous-time state-space model for rapid quality control of Argos locations from animal-borne tags. Move. Ecol. 8, 31 (2020). https://doi.org:10.1186/s40462-020-00217-7).

The columns are:

Id = seal identifier
date = date/time in YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:SS format
lon = longitude
lat = latitude
max_depth = maximum depth of the dive. Depths are negative to match the IBCSO data
ibcso2 = IBCSO V2 bathymetry at that point
dfb = distance from bathymetry calculated as ibcso2-depth, so that a positive value indicates the dive was deeper than IBCSO
species= species of seal that collected the data (Mirounga leonina or Leptonchtyes weddellii)

Lineage

Progress Code: onGoing

Notes

Purpose
To improve East Antarctic bathymetry using seal dive depth data.