News
New home for OBIS Brazil
new OBIS node Brazil
The Long-term Ecological Research Program Coastal Habitats of Espírito Santo in Brazil will operate the OBIS Brazil node and will be coordinated by Ms Ana Carolina Mazzuco as the new OBIS node manager.
Njeri Murage joined the OBIS secretariat to support the development of geospatial information.
OBIS intern Kenya
We welcome Ms Njeri Murage (Kenyan) as a new intern at the OBIS secretariat in Oostende. She support us with the further development of the PostGIS database and GeoServer to store and provide access to spatial information, including area shapes and biodiversity indicators.
OBIS 2.0 released
OBIS 2.0
We are pleased to launch the release of the second generation of OBIS (OBIS 2.0). Not only the URL has changed from IOBIS.ORG to OBIS.ORG. OBIS now runs on a complete new infrastructure and technology stack, which enables real-time data harvesting and integration and more powerful tools for data analytics and product development.
OBIS Training course, Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico, 14-18 January 2019
OBIS training Mexico
18 researchers and students from Mexico participated in an OBIS training course in Mexico, 14-18 January 2019. This week long course has unlocked a lot of new data from Mexico and may also lead to the establishment of an OBIS node for the Gulf of Mexico.
Report of the 7th Session of the OBIS steering group, 12-16 November 2018, Oostende, Belgium
OBIS Steering Group Meeting report
36 participants from 24 countries representing 24 OBIS nodes attended the 7th OBIS steering group meeting in Oostende (Belgium). The OBIS Steering Group made 35 recommendations and decisions, and defined 48 action items in an ambitious 2019 work plan. The meeting report is now available online.
We are hiring! UNESCO contract for an OBIS IT consultant
OBIS vacancy consultancy
We're hiring a 6-month OBIS IT consultant to develop an online data entry and editing tool that will make it easier to publish (a small number of incidental) observations to OBIS, allowing individual researchers to report important observations from under-represented areas and time periods and underreported species. Application deadline 15 November 2018
Recently published datasets
Use cases
Some fish go deeper to cool off in warming seas
community temperature index climate change
A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change using OBIS data showed how fish, demersal and planktonic communities changed as warm-water species increase and cold-water marine species become less successful due to climate warming.
The great dying at the end of the Permian linked to ocean warming and oxygen loss
Biogeography extinction climate change
A study published in Science using historical data of ocean warming and oxygen loss, combined with species traits and occurrence data from OBIS revealed patterns of habitat loss and extinction at the end of the Permian period.
Microscopic “body-snatchers” and “planktonic-greenhouses” are ubiquitous with contrasting biogeographies and abundance in our oceans
Biogeography mixotrophs plankton
A study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B using data from OBIS investigated for the first time the biogeography of mixotrophs, planktonic species which acquire phototrophic capability from their prey. The study shows that “body-snatchers”, (e.g., ciliates, which can steal plastids from their prey) dominate high-biomass areas such as coastal seas while the “planktonic-greenhouses” (e.g., Rhizaria, which enslave entire populations of their prey as endosymbionts) are particularly dominant in oligotrophic open seas. The findings from this study significantly changes the understanding of the functioning of the marine food web and hence the trophodynamics and the biogeochemical cycles in the oceans.
Coastal benthic biogeographic regions are stable across the millennia
Biogeography fossil data
A new study published in Global Ecology and Biogeography, using recent occurrence data from the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) and fossil data from the Paleobiology Database, showed that modern and the near past global ecosystem feature highly similar biogeographic structures, which is remarkable given the known climatic variations of the past ten million years.
