In recent years, there have been a number of points raised within the CCAMLR Scientific Committee and its Working Groups regarding the need:
- To utilise external databases,
- To have databases that house research data, which is not "traditional" CCAMLR data.
Within SCAR there are a number of groups relevant to the work of CCAMLR. One of the most prominent in recent years is the SCAR Krill Expert Group (SKEG), and the most recent is the SCAR Action Group on Fish (SCARFISH), but other groups such as the Expert Group on Birds and Marine Mammals (EG-BAMM) and the Expert Group on Antarctic Biodiversity Informatics (EG-ABI) all have data and research which are relevant to CCAMLR. Further, the SCAR Research Programme Integrated Science to Inform Antarctic and Southern Ocean Conservation (Ant-ICON) aims to answer fundamental scientific questions related to the conservation and management of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.
Given that one of the challenges to utilising existing databases is knowing what already exists, here we highlight a number of databases and tools that should be of interest to the work of the Scientific Committee and its Working Groups. We hope that bringing these resources to the attention of the CCAMLR community will help maximise the use of existing datasets but also reduce duplication of effort and improve these products by highlighting how data can be contributed to existing databases.