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MARIA LOURDES D. PALOMARES, ELIZABETH MOHAMMED, AND DANIEL PAULY ON EUROPEAN EXPEDITIONS AS A SOURCE OF HISTORIC ABUNDANCE DATA ON MARINE ORGANISMS: A CASE STUDY OF THE FALKLAND ISLANDS

IN READING THE narratives of historic seagoing expeditions, we came to realize that observations made by early naturalists provide usable data on relative abundance, size, and habitat, feeding behavior, and uses and trade by the local people, for a time depth not usually provided by other methods used in the study of biodiversity. We offer here an approach for recording and "scoring" these observations in a reproducible fashion, such that temporal trends in biodiversity can be inferred. This method can be employed by environmental historians to reach further into the past, especially in areas where reliable statistical data is missing, as is often the case with ocean issues. We chose to focus on the Falkland Islands for our case study, as these islands apparently were uninhabited when Europeans discovered them, and have since been a port of call for many vessels.	1
MATERIALS AND METHODS
OUR INITIAL BIBLIOGRAPHIC search identified more than five thousand records corresponding to a combination of these keywords: Falkland, expedition, survey, voyage, and natural history. However, only fifty were pertinent to our study, of which sixteen (3,700 pages) were available at the University of British Columbia library (see Table 1).	2
Table 1. Sources and Number of Abundance "Anecdotes" Included in this Study.
Accounts of marine organisms occurring in a specific locality were extracted and encoded into the historic expeditions and surveys database, a relational Microsoft Access database hosted by the Sea Around Us project website (see www.seaaroundus.org). Each observation or "anecdote" (comprising one or several sentences or paragraphs) was coded according to the perceived abundance of a group of species, using a multi-level system suggested by Dr. Jeremy Jackson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, using these categories: extremely abundant; abundant; very common; common; rare; absent; and unknown (an "occurrence" where no inference on abundance was possible).	3
Map 1. The Falkland Islands (southwest Atlantic Ocean). The dots indicate the areas where natural history observations are available in the historic expeditions and survey database of the Sea Around Us Project. The sizes of dots represent the number of observations at each locality. Created by Adrian Kitchingman and Rachel Atanacio.   . . . There are about 4646 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.