1. Why do we want to monitor horseshoe crabs across the Asian countries?
The current distribution of Asian horseshoe crabs is not well known. We therefore want to use this monitoring website to connect horseshoe crab researchers around the world and assemble important biological data for horseshoe crab conservation. More specifically, we want to use this site to generate data for
- updating our knowledge on global horseshoe crab distribution
- building local and regional species distribution models
These guidelines should help you to participate in the effort as a collaborator and collect the necessary biological information from your region by collecting data on species occurrence, life stage, gender, density, etc from yourself as well as from colleagues, students, and hobby scientists.
2. Build up your local monitoring network, or run a student project about Horseshoe crabs
There are several ways to assemble the necessary data from your region. First you or your local colleagues may already have recorded observations. Second, you may want to go out and generate new observations, or ask your students and schoolteachers to make short field excursions in the region to map typical horseshoe crab habitats. Third, you or your students may be able to generate observation data from the literature. For all three cases we provide a DATA SHEET TEMPLATE for download at the bottom of this page. You can take a printed version of this table with you and fill it out when you are in the field. You can establish small projects around these field trips where students or school classes can design a scientific hypothesis, learn new techniques, and analyse the collected data.
3. Prepare a new data collection
The basic information we need is sightings of individuals. This information is indicated in yellow columns in the DATA SHEET TEMPLATE at the bottom of this page. We also have published a species identification guide to help you with determining the right species and the right sex.
If you collect new records from the field, there is much additional information, which can easily be collected and used for analyzing regional or global patterns of horseshoe crab distribution. Take a look at the data sheet template and think about the equipment that you may need to take into the field (or provide to your students and school classes). This may include rulers (measure length), a mobile phone (to take pictures and register coordinates), a thermometer (to measure water temperature), etc. When you are in the field, please take photos of the locations, habitats, sample methods, and individuals. It may be too difficult to measure environmental data other than temperature in the field, but if you have the necessary instruments in your lab you could ask your students or school class to simply bring back a bottle of water. You (or they) could then measure salinity and pH in your lab.
Of course, you can also digitize data from the literature. In this case, please make sure you include the original references in the observation report.
You can also send us only pictures or movies from horseshoe crabs individuals or habitats. But we need both a time stamp and a geo-location associated with it. You can use the DATA SHEET TEMPLATE at the bottom of this page to fill in important information associated with pictures and movies.
4. Submit data
Below we have prepared a excel data sheet template in the right format to collect records. The yellow columns in the sheet must be filled and will give us the most basic information. The white columns are design to assemble information for more in-depth assessment of horseshoe crab populations. When you return from your field trip you can organize a local folder on your computer with the data sheets and photos. You can then use Dropbox or send the data directly to us. The contact is 'matthias.obst[at]marine.gu.se'. We will then create an account for you on the website and upload all your information.
5. Collaboration
Once you have an account, you will be able to access all data created by the network. We will put a table with list of contributors and countries covered on the site as well. We are also planning to deposit global environmental data (e.g. salinity, temperature, chlorophyll, tide, etc) in appropriate format. You can use these for example to make correlation analysis with horseshoe crab observation records, either as a part of your student/school project or for your own research. We are planning to continuously develop the contents of this site, so please also send us feedback and suggestions.
6. Data licencing rules and ethical requirements
Eventually we want to make all data submitted to this site publicly available. But for some limited time we can make your records accessible only to the members of this network. You can choose to submit your observations fro restricted access to our network, or as publicly accessible data under the Creative Commons licence CC BY 3.0. In this case all biological observations will become public under the condition that anyone re-publishing these data cites the original data source.
All data (incl. you personal information about account name, email address, country, etc) will be stored at the Natural History Museum London, UK. The Museum is registered as Data Controller with the UK Information Commissioners Office (https://ico.org.uk/) and fully complies with the core principles of the UK Data Protection Act (https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/.
You reports may include observations made by a third party (e.g. records or images collected by your students), or information about third parties (e.g. a photo of a child with an animal in its hand). Please make sure that you obtain consent for submitting these data from all people who contributed to this information or who have personal information exposed by the submission.
