Macrobenthic Cumacea collected by epibenthic sledge from the Amundsen Sea in March 2008 and from the Prince Gustav Channel and Duse Bay, Eastern Antarctic Peninsula in March 2018

In 2008 RRS James Clark Ross investigated the marine benthic biodiversity in Amundsen Sea and in 2018 the marine benthic biodiversity of the Prince Gustav Channel (PGC) area and the macrobenthic cumacean fauna (Peracarida, Crustacea) collected by epibenthic sledge (EBS) has been assessed for species richness, abundance and assemblage composition. In total 4431 cumacean specimens assigned to 58 morphospecies and 5 families were identified. To set the cumacean dataset into a wider context, published cumacean species richness and abundance data from EBS collected stations in the Magellan Region and Southern Ocean (Rehm et al 2007, Muehlenhardt-Siegel 1999, Cordoba & San Vincente 2009) were added. This dataset provides data for 1) Amundsen Sea and PGC EBS locations, 2) Amundsen Sea and PGC EBS cumacean abundances, 3) Magellan Region and Southern Ocean EBS cumacean standardised 1000 m trawl length abundances (175 - 3500 m depth). Funding for the expeditions and KL was provided by NERC NC Science for the BAS core project BIOPEARL and for NERC urgency grant NE/R012296/1 'Benthic biodiversity under Antarctic ice-shelves - baseline assessment of the seabed exposed by the 2017 calving of the Larsen-C Ice Shelf'. Funding for DD was provided by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft grant Br1121/51-1.