News
Vacancy - OBIS Capacity Development Officer (one year)
Vacancy Consultant Training
We are offering a one-year consultancy contract to support OBIS in the development of training material. The deadline for applications is 31 December 2021.
Serita Van Der Wal joined the OBIS secretariat
GOOS Biology data manager secretariat
We welcome Ms Serita Van Der Wal (South Africa) at the OBIS secretariat based at the IOC Project Office for IODE in Oostende (Belgium). She will support us in (i) managing the information about observing systems, networks, and data assets provided via a portal for the Global Ocean Observing System, Biology and Ecosystems Panel (GOOS BioEco) and (ii) provide coordination with the observing systems, networks, and data-producing projects contributing to biological and ecosystem Essential Ocean Variables (EOV) with the aim to bring more of the data from these facilities fully online through OBIS, and become interoperable and reusable as part of an integrated global ocean observing system.
Help us identify your needs for marine biodiversity data
Survey
To evaluate how growing needs for data and information can be met, OBIS is organizing an online survey. The survey closes at 14 November 2021. It will only take 5 minutes of your time. Thanks in advance!
OBIS partners with marine World Heritage sites in a global project to study biodiversity.
UNESCO World Heritage center eDNA
UNESCO launches an ambitious global citizen science project to assess the diversity of fish and endangered species at marine World Heritage sites. Environmental DNA analyses across a selection of these sites will also provide information to enable global analyses on the vulnerability of flagship marine protected areas to climate change. The project called: "eDNA expeditions in marine World Heritage Sites" is also endorsed as a project of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development.
OBIS webinar on genetic data, 28 October 2021
Webinar Genetic data DNA derived data extension
Occurrences based on genetic data can now be added to the OBIS database with the DNA-derived data extension. Join the webinar to hear more about how this is done, and how these data can be accessed.
Vacancy - Consultant strategic advice for OBIS (2 months)
Vacancy Consultant
To meet rising expectations related to the UN Ocean Decade, we have opened a call for a 2-month consultancy contract to review our stakeholder needs as well as the capacity in the OBIS network to meet those needs. The deadline for application is the 22nd of August.
Recently published datasets
Use cases
Occupancy‐derived thermal affinities reflect known physiological thermal limits of marine species
climate physiology biogeography
In this study we used the robis package to extract 2,176,906 OBIS occurrence records for 533 marine species from 24 taxonomic classes for which we had access to experimentally derived thermal limits. By linking these occurrence records to global sea surface and sea bottom temperature, we compared the temperatures at which species actually live to their thermal limits.
(free e-book) Biogeographic Atlas of the Deep NW Pacific Fauna
NW Pacific deep-sea benthos
The Biogeographic Atlas of the Deep NW Pacific Fauna’ has been published by Pensoft as an open-access e-book, after a three-year intense collaboration of more than 40 deep-sea experts around the word. This book is designed as a guide, synthesis, and review of the current knowledge of the benthic fauna that is distributed in the bathyal and abyssal zones (below 2,000 m) of the NW Pacific. All the data (old and new) used are available in OBIS.
Some fish go deeper to cool off in warming seas
community temperature index climate change
A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change using OBIS data showed how fish, demersal and planktonic communities changed as warm-water species increase and cold-water marine species become less successful due to climate warming.
The great dying at the end of the Permian linked to ocean warming and oxygen loss
Biogeography extinction climate change
A study published in Science using historical data of ocean warming and oxygen loss, combined with species traits and occurrence data from OBIS revealed patterns of habitat loss and extinction at the end of the Permian period.
Microscopic “body-snatchers” and “planktonic-greenhouses” are ubiquitous with contrasting biogeographies and abundance in our oceans
Biogeography mixotrophs plankton
A study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B using data from OBIS investigated for the first time the biogeography of mixotrophs, planktonic species which acquire phototrophic capability from their prey. The study shows that “body-snatchers”, (e.g., ciliates, which can steal plastids from their prey) dominate high-biomass areas such as coastal seas while the “planktonic-greenhouses” (e.g., Rhizaria, which enslave entire populations of their prey as endosymbionts) are particularly dominant in oligotrophic open seas. The findings from this study significantly changes the understanding of the functioning of the marine food web and hence the trophodynamics and the biogeochemical cycles in the oceans.
Coastal benthic biogeographic regions are stable across the millennia
Biogeography fossil data
A new study published in Global Ecology and Biogeography, using recent occurrence data from the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) and fossil data from the Paleobiology Database, showed that modern and the near past global ecosystem feature highly similar biogeographic structures, which is remarkable given the known climatic variations of the past ten million years.
