Measures of feeding activity in 17 species of shallow water marine benthos, as assessed visually by SCUBA divers. The aim of the study was to determine the seasonal and interannual variability in feeding activity. Data were taken once or twice a month over the period from October 1997 to May 2005. Not all species were monitored for the entire duration of the study, and the number of observations per species ranged from 21 to 133.

We present the Weddell Sea Benthic Dataset (WSBD), a computer vision-ready collection of high-resolution seafloor imagery and corresponding annotations designed to support automated analysis of Antarctic benthic communities. The dataset comprises 100 top-down images captured during RV Polarstern Expedition PS118 (cruises 69-1 and 69-6) in 2019, using the Ocean Floor Observation and Bathymetry System (OFOBS) in the Weddell Sea, Antarctica. A subset of this imagery was manually annotated by ecologists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) to support ecological analyses, including benthic community composition and species interaction studies. These annotations were subsequently standardised into 25 morphotypes to serve as class labels for object detection tasks. Bounding box annotations are provided in COCO format, alongside the training, validation, and test splits used during model development at BAS. This dataset provides a benchmark for developing and evaluating machine learning models aimed at enhancing biodiversity monitoring in Antarctic benthic environments. This work was funded by the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship MR/W01002X/1 ''The past, present and future of unique cold-water benthic (sea floor) ecosystems in the Southern Ocean'' awarded to Rowan Whittle.

Model weights for the optimal object detection model, trained on the Weddell Sea Benthic Dataset. Trained 2025-05. Weights should be used with a Deformable-DETR architecture. This work was funded by the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship MR/W01002X/1 ''The past, present and future of unique cold-water benthic (sea floor) ecosystems in the Southern Ocean'' awarded to Rowan Whittle.