1. Australian Antarctic Data Centre
2. Discover and Manage Data
3. Records
4. Aliens_in_Antarctica_survey_data

Description

In principle all Antarctic visitors in the 2007/2008 southern summer season received a questionnaire called the General Visitor Survey (GVS) about previous use of their clothing and other equipment, and their travel pattern in the year before their Antarctic visit (pages 1 and 2 of the questionnaire Aliens_in_Antarctica_QUESTIONNAIRE_2.5.pdf).

Passengers that were sampled for propagules also filled in the GVS questionnaire, but with a third page, with questions about the previous use of specific items of clothing and other gear. The data from this page is called the Visitor Clothing Survey (VCS).

To collect the data from the questionnaire forms these were optically scanned by a specialized company, and the results were sent to the investigators in spreadsheets. Some forms arrived only after the scanning was completed. From these we entered the data by hand.

On the packets with questionnaires and samples the name of the ship/airplane was written, as well as the date of collection of the data and/or samples.

Questionnaires were available in various languages, so most people could fill in a questionnaire in their own language.

A total of ca. 5024 GVS forms were received. In addition to these, some 845 VCS questionnaires were received (file = Aliens_in_Antarctica_VCS_questionnaire_data.xls).
Of the VCS questionnaire the first 2 pages were identical to the GVS form, and the data from the first 2 pages of all VCS forms were added to the GVS data (none of the visitors filled in both forms), bringing the total up to 5869.

Personnel

The data were collected by a large number of volunteers on the various ships and airplanes travelling to the Antarctic in the 2007/2008 summer season.
Responsible for the organisation of the data collecting were:

Dr. A.H.L. Huiskes, Netherlands Institute of Ecology, P.O. Box 140, 4400 AC Yerseke, The Netherlands

Dr. D.M. Bergstrom, Australian Antarctic Division, Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, 203 Channel Highway, Kingston 7050, Australia.

Dr. K. Hughes, British Antarctic Survey, Natural Environment Research Council, High Cross, Madingley Road Cambridge CB3 0E T, UK

Dr. M. Lebouvier, University of Rennes 1, Station Biologique, 35380 Paimpont, France

Dr. J. Lee, Centre for Invasion Biology, Department of Botany and Zoology, Stellenbosch University, Private Bag X1, Matieland 7602, South Africa

Dr. S. Imura, National Institute of Polar Research, Tokyo, Japan


Dr N.J.M. Gremmen, Netherlands Institute of Ecology, P.O. Box 140, 4400 AC Yerseke, The Netherlands, was responsible for the organisation of the data in digital form.

Quality

For questionnaire pages where not a single question was filled in (i.e. all answers appear to be 0) it was assumed the questions were not answered, and the values for all variables on this page were assumed to be "missing".

The data from the forms were checked for inconsistencies, before being used in data analyses. In the present file, however, we give the data as they were collected, without any corrections.

Access

These data are publicly available for download from the provided URL. See the related metadata records for further data.

Temporal Coverages

• Start date: 2007-09-01 - Stop date: 2008-03-31

Spatial Coverages

Science Keywords

• EARTH SCIENCE > BIOSPHERE > VEGETATION > EXOTIC VEGETATION
• EARTH SCIENCE > HUMAN DIMENSIONS > ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS
• EARTH SCIENCE > HUMAN DIMENSIONS > ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS > CONSERVATION
• EARTH SCIENCE > HUMAN DIMENSIONS > HABITAT CONVERSION/FRAGMENTATION
• EARTH SCIENCE > BIOSPHERE > ECOLOGICAL DYNAMICS > SPECIES/POPULATION INTERACTIONS > EXOTIC SPECIES

Use Constraints

This data set conforms to the CCBY Attribution License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Please follow instructions listed in the citation reference provided at http://data.aad.gov.au/aadc/metadata/citation.cfm?entry_id=Aliens_in_Antarctica_survey_data when using these data.