The Savannah River Site (SRS) is a US Department of Energy owned facility located in South Carolina. Located within the SRS property are a series of ephemeral wetlands known as Carolina Bays. These ephemeral wetlands are home to numerous zooplankton species. The specific species found in the bays (their community composition) changes throughout the seasons as bays fill with rain water or dry down during the hot summer months.

The Database on Zooplankton of Carolina Bays is an open dataset of 485,047 zooplankton specimens representing 133 taxa from 14 bays sampled monthly between January 2009 and spring 2016, collected and curated by the University of Georgia and the Savannah River Ecology Lab. Sampling and species identification was performed by members of Drake Lab. For a thorough description of sampling methods see Zokan, 2015.

The Zooplankton Diversity Project makes these data publicly available and discoverable through a web-based data portal and data visualization toolkit developed in D3. Along with bay profiles and a taxonomic tree, the site provides interactive plots of species distribution by bay, species co-occurrence, population dynamics by species and bay, and community similarity over time using Nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS).

Dallas, T.A., J.M. Drake, M.V. Evans, R.B. Kaul, A.M. Kramer, É. Marty, P.B. Miller, E.B. O’Dea, R.L. Richards, A.M. Schatz, M.A. Zokan. 2018. Zooplankton Diversity Project. University of Georgia. [updated May 15, 2018]. http://zooplankton.ecology.uga.edu

Zokan, M.A. Zooplankton species diversity in the temporary wetland system of the Savannah River Site, South Carolina, USA. 2015. PhD dissertation. [online] [data]

Dallas T.A., Kramer A.M., Zokan M., and Drake J.M. 2016. Ordination obscures the influence of environment on plankton metacommunity structure. Limnology and Oceanography Letters 1:54–61. [online] [data]