EurOBIS celebrates its 20th anniversary with a super-harvest!
The European Ocean Biodiversity Information System - EurOBIS - was established in 2004, with its first datasets going live in August-September of that same year. Its general goal was - and still is - helping to fill gaps in our scientific knowledge by making diverse biogeographic data on marine species freely available and accessible online. EurOBIS is part of the OBIS network, supporting the general OBIS goal, but focused on data collected within European marine waters, or collected by European researchers and institutes outside Europe. Within Europe, EurOBIS closely collaborates with other regional OBIS nodes (OBIS-UK, MedOBIS, OBIS Black Sea), for which EurOBIS functions as an additional support and gateway to make marine biodiversity data freely and openly available.
To celebrate this 20th anniversary, the EurOBIS Data Management Team has done some extra efforts, and we’re offering all users an exceptional harvest of no less than 100 datasets. Of these 100 datasets, 87 are completely new, and 13 present an update of a pre-existing dataset in EurOBIS. This brings the totals of EurOBIS to 1.413 datasets and 41.8 million occurrence records, corresponding to a rise in occurrence records of more than 1 million in a single harvest. With each single harvest, we are still documenting new species occurrences. When comparing these numbers to the situation on the 15th anniversary - 889 datasets, representing 24 million distribution records -, EurOBIS has almost doubled its numbers in the past five years.
EurOBIS thus has a rich and dynamic history, both in terms of content, as well as infrastructure. EurOBIS keeps track of recent developments in the field of data formats and standards, compatible with DarwinCore. Whilst EurOBIS started out as capturing presence and abundance data of species, it followed trends and needs in biodiversity informatics and changes have been implemented to allow for the publication of e.g. all biodiversity-related measurements (DwC eMoF), and the most recently merged data types (e.g. tracking data & image-based data). The collaboration with other European initiatives also allows for the offer of online tools for data suppliers to quality control their data, which generally increases both the data quality and ease of sharing.
It is the never-ending contributions of countless data providers and continuous financial support through LifeWatch and EMODnet Biology that keep EurOBIS dynamic, and the Data Management Team on their toes. Our 20th anniversary is an excellent opportunity to thank all of our funders, providers and all data management team members since 2004. Without you, EurOBIS would not be where it is today, we’re happy to celebrate this anniversary together with you and we’re looking forward to many more!
