Toward an atlas of Salish Sea biodiversity: the flora and fauna of Galiano Island, British Columbia, Canada. Part I. Marine zoology

Abstract

Based on records dating from 1859 to 2021, we provide an overview of the marine animal diversity reported for Galiano Island, British Columbia, Canada. More than 650 taxa are represented by 20,000 species occurrence records in this curated dataset, which includes dive records documented through the Pacific Marine Life Surveys, museum voucher specimens, ecological data and crowd-sourced observations from the BC Cetacean Sightings Network and iNaturalist. We describe Galiano Island's marine animal diversity in relation to the Salish Sea's overall biodiversity and quantify the proportional contributions of different types of sampling effort to our current local knowledge. Overviews are provided for each taxonomic group in a format intended to be accessible to amateur naturalists interested in furthering research into the region's marine biodiversity. In summary, we find that the Pacific Marine Life Surveys, a regional community science diving initiative, account for 60% of novel records reported for Galiano Island. Voucher specimens account for 19% and crowd-sourced biodiversity data 18% of novel records, respectively, with the remaining 3% of reports coming from other sources. These findings shed light on the complementarity of different types of sampling effort and demonstrate the potential for community science to contribute to the global biodiversity research community. We present a biodiversity informatics framework that is designed to enable these practices by supporting collaboration among researchers and communities in the collection, curation and dissemination of biodiversity data.

Entangled Artifacts: The Meeting Between a Volunteer-run Citizen Science Project and a Biodiversity Data Platform

“…Since 2017, this relationship has enabled a series of activities to directly support BioGaliano, carry out novel biological and technological research, and build relationships with other communities through sharing data and tools. For example, these have included co-design work to create novel data visualizations for Biodiversity Galiano's website, constructive research informed by the technical challenges of managing biodiversity data [4], and supporting the formal publication of data collected and curated by BioGaliano contributors [28].…”

“…The website's role as an object that embraces BioGaliano's plural activities is evidenced by how it serves both to contextualize the project's research outputs (e.g. [28]) in islanders' data contributions, and as a motivation for further communal activities. For example, Andrew has organized collective photography excursions to collect material for the site's "place pages", which highlight particular locales on Galiano and data related to them.…”