Overview CenSeam, an International Program on Seamounts within the Census of Marine Life: Achievements and Lessons Learned Karen I. Stocks1*, Malcolm R. Clark2, Ashley A. Rowden2, Mireille Consalvey2, Thomas A. Schlacher3 1 San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California, United States of America, 2 National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research, Wellington, New Zealand, 3 Faculty of Science, University of the Sunshine Coast, Maroochydore, Australia In 2005 the Census of Marine Life launched ‘‘A Global Census of Marine Life on Seamounts’’ (CenSeam), an international science project to increase our knowledge of the ecology of seamounts. Specifically, the mission of CenSeam was to determine the role of seamounts in the biogeography, biodiversity, productivity, and evolution of marine organisms, and to evaluate the effects of human impacts on seamounts. Here we overview the history, goals, activities and program- matic outcomes of CenSeam, with recommendations for improving similar programs in the future. Effective components of the project included mini-grants of generally less than US$10,000 to fund proposal development or difficult-to-fund research, or to expand the scope of an expedition; travel funds for data analysis working groups to meet, several times if needed, to address a targeted research question; advanced training workshops for both young researchers and established scientists; staff support for organizing books, special issues in journals, and review papers; and advising conservation and management initiatives on seamount science. From a program- matic perspective, the lessons learned include the importance of: having the science community develop and endorse the key programmatic and scientific goals; in-person meetings and workshops to foster new collaborations; promoting open data sharing; funding salary time for critical work; and establishing and actively managing open communication mechanisms to allow scientists to develop a consensus opinion on science topics, which could then be conveyed to conservation and management organizations. Introduction Seamounts (undersea mountains) continue to be focal areas for marine science, encompassing research that ranges from plate tectonics, oceanic convective heat budgets, the physical structure and dynamics of the ocean’s water masses, and the composition of the ancient atmosphere [1–5]. Research into the ecological function of seamounts is equally varied. Several groups of organisms have demonstrated hotspots of elevated biomass over seamounts, including mobile pelagic fauna [6–9] and larger invertebrates on the seafloor [10,11]. Seamounts can act as refugia: as presumably isolated habitats, they create conditions that favour the existence of ‘living fossils’ and, in a few isolated cases, support archaic assemblages that are more similar to fossil strata than extant communities [12–14]. This refugia function of seamounts may gain new importance as future, shallow-water refuge areas for deep-water corals that become displaced from deeper layers by changing ocean chemistry [15,16] (but see [16]). Conventional wisdom previ- ously held that seamounts mimic islands whose biological communities contain more species of small geographic ranges (i.e. ‘endemics’) than other areas of the oceans, though this notion has been challenged in recent studies, including those employing genetic techniques [12,17–19]. Instead, seamount communities, though they have structural differences, may play a dynamic role in the source-sink dynamics of abutting systems [20]. There is widespread consensus that biological components of seamounts are highly vulnerable and sensitive to human disturbance and exploitation [21,22]. The best documented, most widespread, and presumably most substantial human impacts on seamounts are caused by fishing. The history of fishing on many seamounts and for many seamount-associated fish stocks shows a classic ‘boom and bust’ pattern, with few seamount fisheries appearing to be sustainable in the longer term [23]. The impacts of fishing extend from detrimental effects on fish stocks to the seafloor: benthic communities are frequently composed of long-lived and fragile invertebrates (e.g. corals) that have very low tolerances to physical encounters with fishing gear [24,25]. Consequently, impacts from bottom-contact fishing can be massive, and recovery times may be in the range of decades to centuries [26]. Mining for mineral deposits on seamounts presents a new, and potentially large, threat to seamount ecosystems [27], and emphasizes a need for global, scientifically robust conservation and management planning for seamounts [28,29]. The increasing biological research on seamounts [30], coupled with these growing management concerns, led to the founding of the Global Census of Marine Life on Seamounts Citation: Stocks KI, Clark MR, Rowden AA, Consalvey M, Schlacher TA (2012) CenSeam, an International Program on Seamounts within the Census of Marine Life: Achievements and Lessons Learned. PLoS ONE 7(2): . doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0032031 Editor: Steven J. Bograd, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/ National Marine Fisheries Service/Southwest Fisheries Science Center, United States of America Received January 3, 2012; Accepted January 17, 2012; Published February 1, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Stocks et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: The project described in this manuscript was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (http://www.sloan.org/), through the Census of Marine Life Program. The Sloan Foundation encourages open source publication for its grantees, and the authors’ program manager at Sloan encouraged the authors’ project to consider PLoS ONE as an outlet. However, their preference was stated as a recommendation not a requirement (the authors were free to submit elsewhere if they chose) and the authors’ funding was not tied in any way to the authors’ decision of publication venue. Aside from this, the funders had no other role in the study design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: kstocks@sdsc.edu PLoS ONE | www.plosone.org 1 February 2012 | Volume 7 | Issue 2 |