Mapping marine biodiversity in the algae belt, Norway

The marine algae belt comprising kelp forests, seagrass meadows and rocky reefs with coralline red seaweeds is one of the most active primary-producing environments in the sea. It also harbors are great diversity of animals including sea squirts, ribbon worms, nick worms, serpulid worms, spionid worms and skeleton shrimps. The species of these groups occupy important ecological functions as herbivores, predators and filter-feeding organisms and can be sessile or agile as well as solitary or colonial. Many of these taxa include invasive species causing among others high economic damage in aquaculture and ship transportation due to biofouling. In this project, we conducted a field inventory and collect species of these taxa in Norway. Most of our records from this project (575 records) have been published in GBiF as part of the NHMO Invertebrate, DNA Bank Other invertebrate groups and DNA Bank Arthropod collections. However, 58 records were deposited in a different collection at NHMO as they do not belong to these three collections. By this dataset, these are publicly released separately to GBiF.