Fauna Annotations for ROPOS Dive R1463 from Southern Hydrate Ridge (VISIONS'11, 2011)

An annotated subset of seafloor imagery from ROPOS dive R1463 at Southern Hydrate Ridge, collected August 17–19, 2011, during the VISIONS’11 University of Washington–NSF–OOI cruise aboard the R/V Thomas G. Thompson. Images were taken with a downward-facing Nikon D7000 at an altitude of about 6 m. The dataset contains 984 images and 14,100 bounding-box annotations of megafauna. Images were subsampled (roughly every tenth image) to avoid overlap, with additional images retained in the Einstein’s Grotto subregion to match the 2022 survey’s density. Images were color corrected and center-cropped from 4256 × 2832 px to 3500 × 2600 px. The original images are available on request from the OOI Regional Cabled Array team (https://interactiveoceans.washington.edu/contact/). Annotations were generated with a YOLOv8 model and manually verified in Roboflow, following an early iteration of Bigham & Carter (2026; https://doi.org/10.1002/lom3.70057). The trained model is available at https://huggingface.co/nikolacj/2011-SouthernHydrateRidge-Megafauna. Classes are morphotypes identified from imagery. Each is listed with its likely taxonomic classification: Anemone: Anthozoa Anthropogenic: human-made debris Brittle Star: Ophiuroidea Crab: Lithodes couesi and Chionoecetes tanneri Deep Sea Sole: Embassichthys bathybius Eelpout: Licenchelys sp. Flatfish: Microstomus pacificus Hagfish: Eptatretus spp. Hermit Crab: Paguroidea Octocoral: Heteropolypus ritteri Rockfish: Sebastidae Sea Cucumber: Pannychia moseleyi Sea Pen: Pennatulacea Sea Star: Asteroidea Skate: Bathyraja trachura Squat Lobster: Munidopsis sp. Unknown / Unknown Fish: unidentified organisms Urchin: Strongylocentrotus fragilis Brittle Star and Squat Lobster annotations are included but are considered unreliable because of the animals’ small size, and they are excluded from the analysis in the associated manuscript. A manuscript describing these data and their analysis is currently in review: Jensen, N. C., et al. Fine-scale distribution mapping using machine learning reveals seep-associated substrate effects on megabenthos at Southern Hydrate Ridge, Oregon. Submitted to BMC Marine Science. This dataset contains the following files: 2011-images/: the 984 processed images (.jpg) Fauna2011_final_annotations.csv: one row per annotation, with columns filename, width, height, class, xmin, ymin, xmax, ymax. Coordinates are pixels from the top-left corner.