The Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS), formerly Ocean Biogeographic Information System, is a web-based access point to information about the distribution and abundance of living

species A species () is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction. It is the basic unit of Taxonomy (biology), ...

in the

ocean The ocean is the body of salt water that covers approximately 70.8% of Earth. The ocean is conventionally divided into large bodies of water, which are also referred to as ''oceans'' (the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian Ocean, Indian, Southern Ocean ...

. It was developed as the information management component of the ten year

Census of Marine Life The Census of Marine Life was a scientific initiative involving a global network of researchers in more than 80 nations, engaged to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the oceans. The census cost US$650 milli ...

(CoML) (2001-2010), but is not limited to CoML-derived data, and aims to provide an integrated view of all marine biodiversity data that may be made available to it on an open access basis by respective data custodians. According to its web site as at July 2018, OBIS "is a global open-access data and information clearing-house on marine biodiversity for science, conservation and sustainable development." 8 specific objectives are listed in the OBIS site, of which the leading item is to "Provide heworld's largest scientific knowledge base on the diversity, distribution and abundance of all marine organisms in an integrated and standardized format".OBIS website (visited 18 July 2018)
/ref>

History and current status

Initial ideas for OBIS were developed at a CoML meeting on benthic (bottom-dwelling) ocean life in October 1997. Recommendations from this workshop led to a web site (http://marine.rutgers.edu/OBIS) at Rutgers in 1998 to demonstrate the initial OBIS concept. An inaugural OBIS International Workshop was held on November 3–4, 1999 in Washington, DC, which led to scoping of the project and outreach to potential partners, with selected contributions published in a special issue of ''Oceanography'' magazine, within which OBIS founder Dr. J. F. Grassle articulated the vision of OBIS as "an on-line, worldwide atlas for accessing, modeling and mapping marine biological data in a multidimensional geographic context." In May 2000, US Government Agencies in the National Oceanographic Partnership Program together with the

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is an American philanthropic nonprofit organization. It was established in 1934 by Alfred P. Sloan Jr., president and chief executive officer of General Motors. The Sloan Foundation makes grants to support origina ...

funded eight research projects to initiate OBIS. In May 2001, the US

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

funded

Rutgers University Rutgers University ( ), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of three campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's C ...

to develop a global portal for OBIS. Also in 2001, an OBIS International Committee was formed and its first meeting was held in August 2001. The production version of the OBIS Portal was launched at Rutgers University in 2002 as the web site http://www.iobis.org, serving 430,000 species-based georeferenced data records from 8 partner databases including fish records from

FishBase FishBase is a global species database of fish species (specifically finfish). It is the largest and most extensively accessed online database on adult finfish on the web.

, cephalopods from CephBase, corals from Biogeoinformatics of Hexacorals, mollusks from the

Indo-Pacific Mollusc Database The Indo-Pacific is a vast biogeographic region of Earth. In a narrow sense, sometimes known as the Indo-West Pacific or Indo-Pacific Asia, it comprises the tropical waters of the Indian Ocean, the western and central Pacific Ocean, and the s ...

and more. By May 2006, the OBIS Portal was able to access 9.5 million records of 59,000 species from 112 databases, and by December 2010 (at the conclusion of the Census of Marine Life) provided access to 27.7 million records representing 167,000 taxon names.www.obis.org: archived version, 13 December 2010
/ref> As at July 2018, the OBIS website states that the system provides access to over 45 million observations of nearly 120,000 marine species (the reduced number of names cited being as a result of synonym resolution, i.e. reduction of taxa recorded under multiple names to a single accepted name), based on contributions from 500 institutions from 56 countries. In 2009 OBIS was adopted as a project by International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE) programme of the

Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC/UNESCO) was established by resolution 2.31 adopted by the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It first met in Paris at ...

(IOC) of

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO ) is a List of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) with the aim of promoting world peace and International secur ...

and in 2011, with the cessation of funding for the Rutgers-based secretariat and portal from the Sloan Foundation, an offer of hosting by the

Flanders Marine Institute The Flanders Marine Institute (Dutch: Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee, VLIZ) is a scientific institution dedicated to marine research. Established in 1999 and headquartered in Ostend, Flanders, VLIZ gathers and disseminates ocean knowledge, promote ...

(VLIZ) in

Ostend Ostend ( ; ; ; ) is a coastal city and municipality in the province of West Flanders in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It comprises the boroughs of Mariakerke, Raversijde, Stene and Zandvoorde, and the city of Ostend proper – the la ...

Belgium Belgium, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. Situated in a coastal lowland region known as the Low Countries, it is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeas ...

was accepted to become the long term host for the system and also the OBIS secretariat moved from Rutgers University to the IOC Project Office for IODE in Ostend from where OBIS is presently maintained and additional development is carried out. The web address changed t

OBIS is thus now located in Ostend, in the same building which is also home to VLIZ. VLIZ maintains two taxonomic databases, the

World Register of Marine Species The World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) is a taxonomic database that aims to provide an authoritative and comprehensive catalogue and list of names of marine organisms. Content The content of the registry is edited and maintained by scien ...

an
IRMNG
the

Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera The Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera (IRMNG) is a taxonomic database which attempts to cover published genus names for all domains of life (also including subgenera in zoology), from 1758 in zoology (1753 in botany) up to the pre ...

, both of which feed into taxonomic decisions used to control the display of species-based information in OBIS and also provide the taxonomic hierarchy via which OBIS content can be navigated. OBIS is currently under the direction of IODE with advice from a steering group, the IODE Steering Group for OBIS (SG-OBIS); operational activities are directed by an OBIS Executive Committee (OBIS-EC) with support from various OBIS Task Teams and ad-hoc OBIS project teams. The OBIS secretariat, hosted at the UNESCO/IOC project office for IODE in Ostend (Belgium), includes the OBIS project manager and data manager and in addition to maintaining the OBIS system also provides training and technical assistance to its data providers, guides new data standards and technical developments, and encourages international cooperation to foster the group benefits of the network. Data available via OBIS cover all groups of organisms that have any association with marine or

estuarine An estuary is a partially enclosed coastal body of brackish water with one or more rivers or streams flowing into it, and with a free connection to the open sea. Estuaries form a transition zone between river environments and maritime environm ...

habitats, also including shorelines and the atmosphere above the ocean, such as marine

vertebrates Vertebrates () are animals with a vertebral column (backbone or spine), and a cranium, or skull. The vertebral column surrounds and protects the spinal cord, while the cranium protects the brain. The vertebrates make up the subphylum Vertebra ...

(fishes, marine mammals, turtles, seabirds, etc.); marine

invertebrates Invertebrates are animals that neither develop nor retain a vertebral column (commonly known as a ''spine'' or ''backbone''), which evolved from the notochord. It is a paraphyletic grouping including all animals excluding the chordate subphylum ...

(including

zooplankton Zooplankton are the heterotrophic component of the planktonic community (the " zoo-" prefix comes from ), having to consume other organisms to thrive. Plankton are aquatic organisms that are unable to swim effectively against currents. Consequent ...

); marine

bacteria Bacteria (; : bacterium) are ubiquitous, mostly free-living organisms often consisting of one Cell (biology), biological cell. They constitute a large domain (biology), domain of Prokaryote, prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micr ...

; and marine

plants Plants are the eukaryotes that form the kingdom Plantae; they are predominantly photosynthetic. This means that they obtain their energy from sunlight, using chloroplasts derived from endosymbiosis with cyanobacteria to produce sugars f ...

(e.g. phytoplankton, seaweeds, mangroves).

OBIS portal

As available web technologies have developed, th
OBIS Portal
has been through a number of iterations since its inception in 2002. Initially the system retrieved remote data in real time in response to a user query and used th
KGS Mapper
to visualize the results. In 2004, centralized metadata indexing and cacheing was introduced leading to faster and more reliable results, and th

was added to options for data visualization. In 2010, a full

web GIS Web GIS, also known as Web-based GIS, are Geographic Information Systems (GIS) that employ the World Wide Web (the Web) to facilitate the storage, visualization, analysis, and distribution of spatial information over the Internet. Web GIS involv ...

based system was introduced for the first time along with a new version of the web site which resulted in considerably more detailed and flexible presentation of search results along with a number of new search options. In April 2018, funding was announced to develop a new "2.0" version of OBIS with improved capabilities., and is released on 29 January 2019."OBIS 2.0 released"
The website URL changed from iobis.org to obis.org.

Regional OBIS nodes

Over the period 2004–present, an international network of

Regional OBIS Nodes The Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS), formerly Ocean Biogeographic Information System, is a web-based access point to information about the distribution and abundance of living species in the ocean. It was developed as the informatio ...

has also been established, that are facilitating the connection of data sources in their region to the master OBIS data network and also increasingly provide specialised services or views of OBIS data to users in their particular region.
Antarctic OBIS
:Hosted by Belgian Biodiversity Platform, Brussels and by

, Ostend. Managed by Bruno Danis
Argentina
:Hosted by Centro Nacional Patagonico - (CENPAT) - CONICET. Managed by Mirtha Lewis
Australia
:Hosted by Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation - Oceans and Atmosphere. Managed by Dave Watts
Canada
:Hosted by Centre of Marine Biodiversity and Bedford Institute of Oceanography. Managed by Bob Branton
China
:Hosted by Institute of Oceanology. Managed by Sun Xiaoxia
Europe
:Hosted by

Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee The Flanders Marine Institute (Dutch: Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee, VLIZ) is a scientific institution dedicated to marine research. Established in 1999 and headquartered in Ostend, Flanders, VLIZ gathers and disseminates ocean knowledge, promote ...

. Managed by Ward Appeltans
Indian Ocean
:Hosted by National Chemical Laboratory and National Institute of Oceanography. Managed by Baba Ingole
Japan
:Hosted by National Institute for Environmental Studies. Managed by Junko Shimura
New Zealand / South West Pacific
:Hosted by National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research. Managed by Don Robertson
Sub-Saharan Africa
:Hosted by Southern African Data Centre for Oceanography. Managed by Marten Grundlingh
Philippines
:Hosted by ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity. Managed by Christian Elloran
Tropical and Subtropical Eastern South Pacific
:Hosted by University of Concepcion. Managed by Ruben Escribando
Tropical and Subtropical Western South Atlantic
:Hosted by University of Sao Paulo (USP) and Reference Center on Environmental Information (CRIA. Managed by Fabio Lang Da Silvera
United States of America
:Hosted by United States Geological Survey (USGS). Managed by Abby Benson.