De Beers Marine Namibia Benthic Monitoring Programme

De Beers Marine Namibia undertake marine diamond mining to depths of 130 m offshore of southern Namibia using remote mining tools. As part of their mining licence agreement with the Government of Namibia, De Beers Marine Namibia have undertaken a number of baseline and impact monitoring surveys with the view to quantitatively assessing the direct and indirect effects of deep-water marine mining on benthic macrofaunal communities, and to monitor post-mining recovery.
Benthic grab samples were collected from both mined and unmined sites in 2005 - 2008 and 2011, using a Van Veen grab. Macrofauna was identified, and abundance and biomass determined.

The data were made available to AfrOBIS as a series of Excel sheets. At AfrOBIS, the data were quality-controlled and transformed to comply with the Darwin Core/OBIS Schema. Funds for data operations were kindly provided by the Census of Marine Life International Cosmos Prize Fund, through a grant to Rutgers University.

戴比尔斯纳米比亚海洋矿业公司（De Beers Marine Namibia）采用远程采矿设备，在纳米比亚南部近海130米水深海域开展海洋金刚石开采作业。作为与纳米比亚政府签订的采矿许可协议的一部分，该公司开展了一系列基线与影响监测调查，旨在定量评估深水海洋采矿对底栖大型动物群落（benthic macrofaunal communities）的直接与间接影响，并监测采矿后的生态恢复情况。
2005年至2008年及2011年，研究人员使用范维恩采泥器（Van Veen grab）在已采矿点与未采矿点采集底栖采泥样品，对样品中的大型底栖动物进行物种鉴定，并测定其丰度与生物量。
该数据集以一系列Excel表格的形式提交至非洲海洋生物地理信息系统（AfrOBIS）。在AfrOBIS平台，工作人员对数据开展了质量控制，并将其转换为符合达尔文核心（Darwin Core）标准与海洋生物地理信息系统（OBIS）数据架构的格式。数据运营所需资金由海洋生物普查国际宇宙奖基金通过向罗格斯大学（Rutgers University）提供的拨款予以资助。