August2017

PezMaya

SciencedatabaseatPezMaya

Objectives

Toclean,sortandupdateallsciencedatabases

Summary

Databases are designed to collect massive amounts of scientific data that is used for research.
Research results are afterwards made into publications or presentations increasing the
communicationofknowledgeamongstscientists.
Here at Pez Maya we gather the data for different projects turtle and bird monitoring, coral
bleaching,incidentalsightings,beachcleanupandcoralreefmonitoring.

Report

PezMayaisamarineconservationbaseandwedoscientificresearchviascubadiving.Overthelast
13 years scientists with the help of volunteers have gathered an enormous amount of data for
differentprojects.Oneofthemainprojectsforusiscoralreefmonitoring.Itincludesfish,coraland
benthicorganismsurveys.ItgivesusdetailedinformationaboutcoralreefhealthintheSianKaan
BiosphereReserve.Everyyearwesurvey21monitoringsitesineachplacedoing8fishand5coral
transects.

Figure 1 Pez Maya Intern working on database clean up.

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TheBiologicaldatabaseplaysacentralroleindoingproperscientificresearch.Weneedapreciseand
longtermdatabasethatgivesusqualityinformation.

Agooddatabasesystemneedstobesecure,reliableandunderstandableforeveryone.Overthelast
couple of months, the Pez Maya team has concentrated on cleaning and sorting out all of our
databases.ThemaingoalforusistosortandsecureMBRSdatabasesowecanstartanalysingthe
collecteddataandpublishourresults.

Doingthiswasachallengingtask.Wewentthrough11,164adultfish,20,532coralcommunities,6690
pointinterceptand8377juvenilefishdatapoints.Alltogether46,763datasetswerecheckedand
sorted,wefoundapproximately25,000errors.

Another great achievement was comparing our electronic database with the paper database,
spending several days checking every document and organizing it in the correct folder and in the
correctplace.Westillhavealotofworktodotocompleteall13yearsofcollecteddata,soonwewill
beabletoconcentrateourenergyondataanalysisandresearch.

Figure 2 Screenshot of one part of database errors, shown by color difference the misspellings.

Weareworkinghardtomakeourdatabasesystemprofessional,accurateandusable.

FormoreinformationontheprojectshereinMexico,visit:
http://www.gvi.co.uk/location/yucatan/

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