By: Ni Putu Dian Pertiwi & M. Danie Al Malik
In this summer 2018, Bionesia team has recovered the latest data from the final stage of the ARMS project, which was aim to study the succession happened in the coral reefs. The project was conducted for one year, with the data collection on every 2 months. The purpose of the different time of the data collection is to study the temporal changes that occur in the ARMS, thus can be infer as the process on how the coral reef was build, from the simplest organism to the complex community.
One of the student helping with ARMS recovery
During this activity, Bionesia also invited students from several universities in Bali – as one of their program to increase the capacity building of local university in performing marine research – including students of Dept. of Biology, Ganesha University; student of Marine & Science Faculty, Udayana University, student of Water Resource & Management Brawijaya University, and student of Fisheries & Marine Science Program, Diponegoro University. In this activity, students whom already have their diving certificate were also trained to do ARMS recovery underwater. Three ARMS were collected for this last phase from Close Encounter area of Pemuteran – Bali.
ARMS disassemble process
Several steps were conducted in order to collect data from the ARMS, including collection of environmental DNA (e-DNA) from the water around ARMS; photographic record of every ARMS plates; collecting motile and sessile organisms; and also photographic record of motile organism living on the ARMS.
The students are collecting motile data
On the last day of the ARMS data recovery, the students were also trained to do project database management. The training was give by Dr. Christopher Meyer and Dr. Rodney Barton Jr. from Smithsonian Institute. The aim of this training is to introduce one of the source website database – GeOMe (Genomic Observatories MetaDatabase – http://geome-db.org/) that can be use to help with the management of the research and project data.