Acknowledgments
During the design and building up of the ChEss database, a number of people have provided essential help and advice.
We would like to thank Karen Stocks (San Diego Supercomputer Center, USA) for advice and suggestions all through the process of the database design and its integration with OBIS, and for sharing her expertise and experiences with Seamounts Online with us.
We also would like to thank Peter Watson (National Oceanography Centre, Spouthampton, UK) for help with the installation of the database on the NOC server and for his valuable comments from the start. We would also like to acknowledge the techical expertise of Daniel Perry (NOCS) who has helped enormously with the recent upgrading of ChEssBase.
We would like to especially thank the scientists who have kindly provided references and papers to be included in the database. In particular, we would like to thank Charleyne Bachraty, PhD student at Université de Montréal, for her help with collating a comprehensive list of cold seep species for ChEssBase. We would also like to thank Sally Hall (NOCS), Nelia Mestre (NOCS) and Ellie Marshall (Freelance) for their help with database population and editing/validation.
Finally, we would like to thank anyone who has used the database in its draft version and has made suggestions and comments for improvements.
ChEssBase is one of the major components of the ChEss project within the Census of Marine Life initiative, funded by the A.P. Sloan Foundation (USA), which is gratefully acknowledged.
