News
Calling all Biodiversity Enthusiasts - Share Your Insights!
MARCO-BOLO survey
The new EU-funded MARCO-BOLO (MARine Coastal BiOdiversity Long-term Observations) project invites you to complete a survey to share your experiences in producing, managing or using marine, coastal, freshwater or terrestrial biodiversity data.
Adopting best practices to better understand life on the ocean floor
OBIS standards Deep sea Best practices
As the gateway to the world’s ocean biodiversity and biogeographic data and information, the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS) of the IOC-UNESCO joined a team of international researchers to develop a new set of best practices to help standardise the information collected for seafloor invertebrates.
OBIS appointed Katherine Tattersall (CSIRO/OBIS-Australia) as co-chair
OBIS Steering Group Meeting report
At the 11th session of the OBIS steering group, Katherine Tattersall was appointed as the new Co-Chair of the IODE Steering Group for OBIS.
11th Session of the OBIS steering group, 23-26 May 2023 (Online)
OBIS Steering Group Meeting report
Forty-five participants from 22 countries representing 24 OBIS nodes participated in the 11th session of the IODE Steering Group for OBIS (SG-OBIS) on 23-26 May 2023. The executive summary and meeting report are now online.
Marine Biodiversity Data Mobilization Workshop 2023
marine biodiversity workshop
This workshop gave me the foundation that I needed in Darwin Core terminology and best practices to be able to submit data to OBIS and contribute to open and FAIR data principles -Marine Lebrec [workshop attendee].
Job Advertisement: eDNA Scientific Data Officer
Vacancy Environmental DNA World Heritage
Do you have a passion for marine biodiversity and climate change research? Are you data-savvy and love working with data? If yes, then we have an exciting opportunity for you! We are looking for an individual consultant to join our team for a 3-month consultancy, starting preferably on May 15th, 2023. The eDNA Scientific Data Officer will work on a citizen-science project called "eDNA Expeditions in Marine World Heritage Sites," which aims to determine the richness of fish species and other marine megavertebrates across 25 marine sites inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
Recently published datasets
Use cases
A review of current knowledge on reproductive and larval processes of deep-sea corals
Corals Deep Sea Depth Distribution Reproduction
This review synthesises the current state of research on the reproduction of deep-sea coral species. OBIS was used to extract occurrence data including sampling/bottom depth, using the robis R package to plot the species by depth and determine the total number of described azooxanthellate corals living at depths below 100m. The study found that less than 7% of known deep-sea coral species have any aspect of their reproduction reported in the scientific literature. This highlights significant gaps and potential priorities for future research.
Climate-driven diversity changes of Mediterranean echinoids over the last 6 Ma
Echinoidea biodiversity paleoclimate biogeography Miocene salinity crisis late Cenozoic
Echinoids are an important component of the Cenozoic marine benthic communities. In this publication, we review their diversity in the Mediterranean area within the Late Miocene to recent, a period of remarkable paleogeographic and paleoclimate changes.
Cumacea (Peracarida) from the deep Nordic Seas
Integrative taxonomy Benthic fauna Deep sea Biogeography
This study compiled and analysed occurrence records of Cumacea from various courses and expeditions, including those available in OBIS, to provide insight into the diversity and distribution of the group from the deep North Atlantic to the Arctic Ocean. The data from this study resulted in the creation of a new OBIS dataset of Icelandic Cumacea (ICECU) from the IceAGE and PASCAL expedition records.
Detecting sperm whales in the eastern Canadian Arctic as sea-ice continues to melt
Bioacoustics climate change marine mammals
Marine environments in the Arctic regions continue to be altered due to prolonged durations of sea ice absence, as a result of climate change. Seasonal shifts of habitat use occur as warmer, ice-free regions become available to many ice avoiding marine mammals. In this study, authors combined collected sighting- and acoustic data, including whaling records accessed through the OBIS database, to explore the range expansion of the ice-avoiding sperm whale in the Eclipse Sound area, Baffin Bay. Sperm whale presence in Eclipse Sound is a recent phenomenon, with only two sighting records of these mammals in this region, in 2014 and 2018, respectively. However, acoustic recordings reveal that sperm whales are present in this region yearly between 2015 and 2019 and that there has been an increase in sperm whale presence over the 5 year study period, closely related to the minimum sea ice concentration of each year.
Reconstructing ocean biodiversity hotspots of the Phanerozoic
global diversity ecological saturation diversification model palaeogeography
Is there a limit to global biodiversity in our oceans? This recent study published in Nature using data from OBIS sheds some new insight into this controversial topic in evolutionary ecology and has led to the authors proposing a new hypothesis, the ‘diversity hotspots hypothesis’.
Detecting life in the deep-sea: a glimpse of the top predator, the Yokozuna Slickhead in Japanese waters.
eDNA metabarcoding baited camera marine protected area
New insights and video footage of possibly the largest deep-sea-endemic predatory teleost fish species, the Yokozuna Slickhead, using a combination of eDNA metabarcoding and baited camera observations, at depths of 2000 m. OBIS occurrence data contributed to the distributional comparison of this species to the only other deep-sea-endemic teleost fish species with total length over 2 m, the Giant Grenadier, Albatrossia pectoralis.
