The Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) was established within the Census of Marine Life program (CoML), supported by a host of organizations including NSF, to house and make available data on all marine species with open-access through the World Wide Web. The OBIS server is located at Rutgers University. OBIS has become an invaluable resource for marine research with contributing members and data users world-wide. It is a world-wide database reflecting the diversity of ocean life, its distribution and abundance and it is an ocean database that will be instrumental in addressing global change issues.
OBIS is intended to transition to the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) and its activity on International Ocean Data Exchange (IODE). This was formalized with the IOC-UNESCO as of 2010 but will take some time to implement. Requests have been made for IOC member states to contribute to support of OBIS starting in 2011; however, immediate support is needed for the transition to secure the future of OBIS. This RAPID award is the appropriate mechanism to quickly provide support for an uninterrupted transition to keep the system viable and available during the process, and to continue the coordinating efforts needs for the incorporation of OBIS into the IOC.
OBIS invaluable to the marine research community, educators, resource managers, and the public. The accumulation of biodiversity data and enhanced accessed through OBIS can lead to better environmental management decisions and educational opportunities world-wide.
The global ocean, and the life within it, is under threat – biodiversity losses - from global warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, overfishing, and other human-induced changes, at an unprecedented rate. While numerous scientific studies are under way to document this biodiversity loss, most are focused on a local or regional level, when a global approach is warranted. OBIS is the world’s largest online, free access, repository of spatially referenced marine life data, designed to provide the global biodiversity data needed to inform management of the global ocean. By pooling the results of many individual studies, OBIS is creating an information base commensurate with the problems facing humankind. OBIS aims to stimulate research and generate new hypotheses on evolutionary processes and species distributions by making data accessible over the Internet and interoperable with other data systems, and serves as a source for information-based governance of ocean biological resources. OBIS actively works with global initiatives such as the Global Ocean Biodiversity Initiative and the Convention on Biological Diversity to integrate scientific information into the international decision making process of management of the marine environment. At present, the international Project Office is hosted by Rutgers University Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences in New Jersey, USA. A global network of Regional and Thematic OBIS Nodes assures the worldwide scientific support needed to fulfill its global mandate. Created as the data integration component of the Census of Marine Life (CoML), OBIS has grown beyond its original scope and now integrates data from many sources, over a wide range of marine themes, from poles to the equator, from microbes to whales. In October 2011, OBIS held over 32,000,000 species distribution records, from over 100,000 different species and 994 datasets. Data integration on this scale critically depends on standards for data exchange and documentation. When possible, existing standards are used and, when needed, OBIS actively advances standard development for quality control and data exchange. OBIS is working with data custodians worldwide to integrate their data sets and expand its data holdings, creating a one-stop online marine life data source of great value to scientists, policymakers, and students, alike. See www.iobis.org. Several scientific articles have been published using OBIS data, and several more are in preparation. While the content of OBIS data holdings might be still too sparse to allow detailed studies of restricted areas, the volume of data is sufficient to study global patterns of the distribution of diversity. Also, present OBIS data holdings allow for a gap analysis, drawing attention to little-studied areas, and facilitates planning of research priorities. In the two graphics submitted with this report, some of these gaps are illustrated. The Google Earth images clearly show how most sampling has been done close to the coast, and how the Southern Pacific is under-represented when compared to the Northern Atlantic. In the section through the Ocean, it is shown that the deep pelagic areas are not sampled at all, leaving a major gap in our knowledge of these unique areas. Since its inception in 2000, OBIS was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In June 2009, OBIS was adopted by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO as one of its activities under its International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE) programme. An NSF grant allowed operations of OBIS beyond the support of the A.F. Sloan Foundation.
