Plattform Platform	Reise-Nr. Cruise-No.	Zeitraum Period	Projekt Project	Arbeitsgebiet Working area
Heincke	HE346	24.01.2011 - 03.02.2011		Doggerbank North Sea

Fahrtleiter Chief Scientist	Institut Institute	Auslaufhafen Port of departure	Einlaufhafen Port of return	Stationskarte Station map	Schiffsroute Trackchart
Turkay Michael	Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg, Frankfurt	Bremerhaven	Bremerhaven

Ziel der Reise / Objectives of Cruise:

The interannual variability of the epibenthic fauna of the Dogger Bank is a long term project of the Senckenberg-Institute since 1991. This project aims at gathering basic data which may form the background information for understanding presumed environmental changes. Therefore the study refers to 37 stations that are, whenever possible, sam-pled on a yearly basis in the same season with the same gear. To gather information about the winter`s influence on the bentic species communities, this is the last of three scheduled winter cruises to the Dogger Bank. This cruise was conducted by the Department for Marine Zoology at the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt am Main. The fauna is recorded quantita-tively from each sample in order to allow studies on relative abundance. Another important aspect is the recording of climate forced changes. This study therefore is also part of the scientific programme of the Research Centre `Biodiversity and Climate (BIK-F)` funded by the state of Hessen since 2008. We thankfully acknowledge this support. The present cruise forms the 20th of the series and gets the suffix DOG-T. All former cruises were labelled after the alphabet with one letter starting with DOG-A in 1992. The first cruise in 1991 was called DOG without any suffix. The cruise started from Bremerhaven, on Tuesday, 2011-01-24. On 13.00 CEST (UTC+1), the vessel left the shipyard and headed towards the main working area, the Doggerbank. Station 14 was reached on January 25, 2011 at 15.47 CEST. At this and the following stations, the following technique was used: current strength and direction were measured with a probe (RCM9) at the seafloor and directly under the surface. In addition, a CTD probe was used to measure the temperature and salinity of the water coloumn. Then, a standardized endobenthic sampling with the Ring Dredge was performed. Subsequently one sample with a 2m-beam-trawl was taken, towed for 2 kn of speed on a length of one nautical mile. These procedures took place on every single station, except stations one and two. Here, a geological dredge was used to sample for sediment containing rubble and sparse boulders. The exact sequence of stations sampled can be seen at the station list. The sampling at the Dogger Bank ended with the last pass at the 48h-station (where the described procedure was repeated every three hours during a timeframe of 48 hours) on February 02, 2011, 13.11 CEST. Due to increasing winds, sampling had to be stopped before schedule after 12 of 16 passes planned at the last station. Due to a bad weather forecast, the vessel was then heading towards Helgoland at 13.15 CEST. It was decided to switch to an alternate programme for the remaining ship time. The area around Helgoland was reached in the morning of February 03, 2011. At 07.59 CEST, the vessel reached the Helgoland Trench south of the island of Helgoland. The beam trawl was de-ployed once from 07.59 to 08.31 CEST on the routine station sampled regularly by our team. The aim of this work was to collect epibenthos-material in order to complement to life-cycle studies of decapod crusta-ceans of the German Bight. Due to a bad weather forecast, the vessel then headed back towards the port of Bremerhaven. It was moored at 11.30 CEST.

Messungen / Measurements