Toward an atlas of Salish Sea biodiversity: the flora and fauna of Galiano Island, British Columbia, Canada. Part I. Marine zoology

We describe Galiano Island's marine animal diversity in relation to the Salish Sea's overall biodiversity and quantify the proportional contributions of different types of sampling effort to our current local knowledge. Overviews are provided for each taxonomic group in a format intended to be accessible to amateur naturalists interested in furthering research into the region's marine biodiversity. In summary, we find that the Pacific Marine Life Surveys, a regional community science diving initiative, account for 60% of novel records reported for Galiano Island. Voucher specimens account for 19% and crowd-sourced biodiversity data 18% of novel records, respectively, with the remaining 3% of reports coming from other sources. These findings shed light on the complementarity of different types of sampling effort and demonstrate the potential for community science to contribute to the global biodiversity research community. We present a biodiversity informatics framework that is designed to enable these practices by supporting collaboration among researchers and communities in the collection, curation and dissemination of biodiversity data.