Ocean Biodiversity Information System
OBIS in a nutshell
OBIS strives to document the ocean's diversity, distribution and abundance of marine life. Within OBIS, the data from EurOBIS are combined with the data collected by all other OBIS nodes. This provides a much wider geographical scope than EurOBIS, which is beneficial for large-scale studies and comparisons.As OBIS keeps growing, users can now start using the data to try to identify biodiversity hotspots and large-scale ecological patterns and plot species distributions in relation to abiotic variables such as temperature, salinity and depth.
Link between EurOBIS & OBIS
EurOBIS is one of the regional nodes of OBIS. Together with the host organisations or institutes of the other OBIS nodes, the Flanders Marine Institute has committed to a continuous support of OBIS, translated in serving freely available occurrence data on European marine species to OBIS.Within the OBIS community, EurOBIS has also committed to follow up the taxonomic standards and quality control. In practice, the EurOBIS data management team checks if provided taxon names can be matched to the World Register of Marine Species or not.
EurOBIS data in OBIS
All data that are originally collected via EurOBIS are sent to OBIS. An overview is available through the EurOBIS provider page of the OBIS website.Datasets that come to EurOBIS through e.g. OBIS SeaMap - a thematic OBIS node -, are not sent to OBIS. This explains the difference in available EurOBIS datasets listed on the OBIS website and the number mentioned on the EurOBIS website. The thematic data are already delivered to OBIS directly through their original node (see international data flow) and transferring these datasets to OBIS again would create duplicates.
