Long term marine biodiversity monitoring in coastal Antarctica: Are fewer rare species recruiting?

The physical environment of nearshore Southern Ocean (coastal Antarctica) is altering rapidly in response to climate change, but also has other long cyclicity due to El Nino Southern Oscillation and Southern Annular Mode. Detecting biological responses to such physical change, which is complex in time and space, is very challenging not least because of remoteness, difficulty of access, frequency of iceberg destruction and short funding cycles but also the paucity of research stations with SCUBA (or ROV) facilities. At one of those few, Rothera, Adelaide Island on the West Antarctic Peninsula, we immersed arrays of artificial substrata (settlement panels) for 1 year repeatedly for over two decades. Whilst many ‘mature assemblages’ monitored at nearshore sites around the world, there are few of similar duration for recruitment and colonisation. We report the variability in annual biodiversity descriptive statistics with the crucial context of also recording adjacent long (here defined as ..., , # Data from: Long term marine biodiversity monitoring in coastal Antarctica: Are fewer rare species recruiting?

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.tdz08kq9t](10.5061/dryad.tdz08kq9t)

## Description of the data and file structure

**This is a data set describing monitoring of marine biodiversity colonization on the seabed near Rothera station Antarctica from 2004-2024.** Between four and six high density perspex panels of size 14 cm x 14 cm were immersed and positioned on rocky substrata at 12 m depth at Adelaide Island, Antarctica (67.568° S, 68.127° W) using SCUBA diving. These were positioned next to large boulders in an attempt to offer some protection from iceberg scour. Such replicate panels were immersed across nine of the last 21 years up to 2024 (placed underwater for 12 months each beginning in the austral summer. Panels were all emersed at the same site (South Cove, Ryder Bay) for the same period (1 year) at 1 to 5 year intervals between 2004-2024.  All panels were immersed in the ...,