Description
TotalEnergies E&P South Africa (TEEPSA) contracted Benthic Solutions Limited (BSL) for the provision of an Environmental Baseline Study (EBS) within Block 5/6/7 located off the southwest coast of South Africa. Survey operations within Block 5/6/7 were carried out aboard the supply vessel Bourbon Evolution 807 between the 8th and 27th of November 2022. Environmental operations were conducted across the 10,422km2 Priority Area to gather information on the physico-chemical and biological environment prior to drilling activities. Block 5/6/7 is located in an area that extends from the continental slope to deep bathyal plain up to 300 km offshore from the South African coast. Water depth of surveyed stations ranged from 677 to 3,115 m below sea level. The sampling strategy was designed by BSL and Creocean to follow TEEPSA set investigation targets and station selection rationale. The sampling plan consisted of sediment and water column sampling combined with seabed video acquisition in order to provide a greater understanding of the regional seabed habitats. Opportunistic marine megafauna observations were also to be undertaken during the survey to provide an understanding of the marine mammal communities present in the Block. This survey included characterisation of the seabed and water column physico-chemistry and biology, as well as, opportunistic observations of marine megafauna by marine mammal observations (MMO) and passive acoustic monitoring (PAM), to provide an understanding of the baseline conditions prior to commencing further drilling and development activities. The main objectives for the survey were to: • Acquire baseline data of sediment and water column physico-chemical characteristics within the survey area. • Identify and assess any existing pollutants within the sediment and the water column, in particular, those related to oil and gas activities within the survey area. • Identify sensitive habitats or species susceptible to disturbance from drilling and construction related activities. • Establish an understanding of the natural variation in environmental conditions against which the environmental impact of future oil and gas operations can be assessed. The sampling plan consisted of sediment and water column sampling combined with seabed video acquisition to provide a greater understanding of the regional seabed habitats. Opportunistic marine megafauna observations were also undertaken during the survey to provide an understanding of the marine mammal communities present in the Block. Based on time constraints as a result of weather, the survey strategy was continually modified to acquire data for priority areas, or areas with no previous data, as agreed with the client.
Data Records
The data in this sampling event resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 122 records.
1 extension data tables also exist. An extension record supplies extra information about a core record. The number of records in each extension data table is illustrated below.
This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.
Versions
The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.
Rights
Researchers should respect the following rights statement:
The publisher and rights holder of this work is TotalEnergies. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC 4.0) License.
GBIF Registration
This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: 30ca25d8-fce4-4d1f-ae3f-c0650826f84e. TotalEnergies publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by GBIF France.
Keywords
Samplingevent; TotalEnergies; TEEPSA; Block 5/6/7; South Africa; EBS; 2022; Marine Mammal; Benthic; Zooplankton; phytoplankton
Contacts
- Originator
- Point Of Contact
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Geographic Coverage
Multiblock Regional, Environmental Baseline Survey, Block 567, South Africa.
| Bounding Coordinates | South West [-90, -180], North East [90, 180] |
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Taxonomic Coverage
N/A
| Kingdom | Animalia |
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| Phylum | Chordata |
| Class | Mammalia |
| Order | Testudines, Cetartiodactyla |
| Family | Balaenopteridae, Delphinidae, Physeteridae, Cheloniidae |
Temporal Coverage
| Start Date / End Date | 2022-11-09 / 2022-11-26 |
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Project Data
No Description available
| Title | Environmental Baseline Study, Block 567 South Africa – 2022 – TotalEnergies E&P South Africa (TEEPSA) |
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| Funding | TotalEnergies E&P South Africa (TEEPSA) contracted Benthic Solutions Limited (BSL) for the provision of an Environmental Baseline Study (EBS) within Block 5/6/7 located off the southwest coast of South Africa. |
| Design Description | Methodology
Marine mammal :
The survey included opportunistic observations of marine megafauna by marine mammal observations (MMO) and passive accoustic monitoring (PAM).
Benthic macrofauna :
49 stations was sampled with a 0.25 m^2 Grey O’Hara box corer at Block 5/6/7 in South Africa for the Environmental Baseline Study by TotalEnergies E&P South Africa (TEEPSA). Infauna were subsambled by a small frame, comprising an area of 0.1m^2. Station depths ranged between 677 to 3115 meters. Sediment Particle Size analyses undertaken for each sampling event.
Zooplancton & phytoplancton :
Planktonic organisms were collected at 5 stations in the block 5/6/7, located between the Benguela current and the Agulhas current, in close proximity to the southern Benguela upwelling ecosystem. At each sampling station, a net with a mesh of 50 µm and another with a mesh of 200 µm were deployed vertically, from 100 m depth to the surface to collect plankton. Samples collected with the 50 µm net were fixed with lugol (2 % final concentration) and analysed using a Flowcan, while samples collected with the 200 µm net were fixed with formol (4 % final concentration) and analysed using a Zooscan. The Flowcam and Zooscan are imagery devices that are used to get pictures of plankton organisms as well as morphometric measurements. Pictures of the organisms were then uploaded on the Ecotaxa platform to get identified by a machine learning algorithm first before being validated by experts in plankton taxonomy. (https://ecotaxa.obs-vlfr.fr/) and sorted by experts into taxonomical taxa. Only living planktonic organisms were kept, therefore the “non-living”, “detritus”, “dead”, “seaweed” categories were removed. Non-identified objects labelled as “othertocheck”, “duplicate”, “multiple” were also removed from the dataset. The “egg” category was also subsided from the analysis since net sampling is not the most suitable way to efficiently collect plankton eggs.
Abundances of the organisms were estimated based on the number of pictures collected and the volume of water filtered by the nets during sampling to obtain a number of individuals m-3 for large organisms collected with the 200 µm net, and individuals or cells L-1 for smaller ones collected with the 50 µm net. However, before abundances were computed, the category “part”, that corresponds to parts of damaged organisms, was removed from the dataset to avoid any overestimation. The same principle was also applied for specific organisms that can easily be damaged and are routinely identified in distinct parts categories. For instance, Appendicularia, which are fragile organisms that can easily be damaged during sampling, were often identified from parts, notably the head, the tail, or the trunk (the head with a part of the tail). To avoid overestimation of their abundances, only the category “tail |
Additional Metadata
| Alternative Identifiers | https://ipt.gbif.fr/resource?r=block-567-2022 |
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