Galaxy and mass assembly:resolving the role of environment in galaxy evolution

We present observations of 18 galaxies from the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey made with the SPIRAL optical integral field unit (IFU) on the Anglo-Australian Telescope. The galaxies are selected to have a narrow range in stellar mass (6 × 10 <M <2 × 10M⊙) in order to focus on the effects of environment. Local galaxy environments are measured quantitatively using fifth nearest neighbour surface densities. We find that the total star formation rates (SFR) measured from the IFU data are consistent with total SFRs measured from aperture correcting either GAMA or Sloan Digital Sky Survey single-fibre observations. The mean differences are SFR/SFR = 1.26 ± 0.23, s = 0.90 and for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey we similarly find SFR/SFR = 1.34 ± 0.17, σ= 0.67. Examining the relationships with environment, we find that off-centre and clumpy Ha emission is not significantly dependent on environment, being present in 2/7 (29 per cent) galaxies in high-density environments (>0.77 Mpc-2), and 5/11 (45+15-13 per cent) galaxies in low-density environments