PETROBRAS: where industry and science touch

Environmental responsibility is a hot topic these days! For the Brazilian oil and gas magnate Petrobras, this means caring for the safety of their operations and undertaking actions to balance their activities and the welfare of their workforce and of the communities. By improving products and processes, increasing efficiency, providing training and sponsoring conservation and ecosystem preservation projects, they always seek to grow by contributing to sustainable development. To do so, Petrobras has an environmental database program, in which the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), one of the components of the LifeWatch Species Information Backbone, plays an important role for standardizing the biological data.

“We need to use WoRMS as a valuable source to our environmental database.”

Petróleo Brasileiro (Petrobras)

The purpose of Petrobras is to provide the energy that sets people and businesses into motion to achieve their potential. Petrobras performs, through their workforce’s unique technical capacity, in the oil exploration and production, refining, natural gas, electric energy, logistics, trade, distribution, petrochemicals, fertilizers, and biofuel segments.

Objectives

Linking the taxon names in an environmental database to the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), ensures that the current status of taxonomy is always known and applied. By using WoRMS, synonyms and currently accepted names can easily be linked together, avoiding possible confusion on the status and name-use of species.

Methodology

To ensure environmental responsibility, Petrobras is doing a lot of environmental monitoring, which results in biological, physical and chemical information. This is stored in their private environmental database.

Many taxonomic experts, from a large number of Brazilian universities, are working on these samples in order to generate information that is used in environmental licensing and decision-making. In the end, all this information is provided to the Brazilian environmental authorities.

To standardize the biological data, Petrobras requested to have access to a copy of Aphia, the database behind the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS).

Used components of the LifeWatch Infrastructure

World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS)

The aim of WoRMS is to provide an authoritative and comprehensive list of names of marine organisms, including information on synonymy. While highest priority goes to valid names, other names in use are included so that this register can serve as a guide to interpret taxonomic literature.

The World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) is one of the largest component data systems contributing to the LifeWatch Species Information Backbone.