The Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) is a user-friendly, web-based
provider of global geo-referenced information on accurately identified marine
species. OBIS is developing powerful new on-line tools for visualizing
relationships among species and their environment. OBIS will assess and
integrate biological, physical, and chemical oceanographic data from multiple
sources, generate testable hypotheses about the origins and maintenance of
marine biodiversity, and facilitate research on the roles of of species in
ecosystem function. Users of OBIS, including researchers, students, and
environmental managers, will gain a dynamic view of the multi-dimensional
oceanic world. New synoptic datasets from environmental sensing technologies
and new techniques for identifying and describing marine species are likely to
result in a quantum increase in knowledge about the distribution and abundance
of life in the oceans over the next ten years. The opportunity for new
scientific breakthroughs, and heightened concern about the health and
persistence of life in the oceans, are the stimulus for the Census of Marine
Life (CoML), an international research program to assess and explain the
diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine organisms throughout the
world's oceans. OBIS is a major component of CoML, as is the History of Marine
Animal Populations (HMAP), whose mission is to gather, restore, and analyze
historical marine population data from the past 500 years, before human
impacts on the ocean became significant. OBIS and HMAP provide the temporal
context, charting fluctuations of species' distributions past and present. This
context is necessary for the third major element of CoML, the Future of Marine
Animal Populations (FMAP), which provides a basis for modeling and prediction of
future oceanic communities. CoML will benefit from related programs such as the
Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS), which will be providing continuous streams
of observations to challenge existing capabilities for data access, analysis,
and presentation. OBIS will play a role in making component biological data
accessible and interpretable to a variety of end-users including maritime
industries, environmental managers, scientists, teachers, and the general
public.
=============================================================
Peter Brueggeman, Director, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library
UCSD, 9500 Gilman Dr, Dept 0219, San Diego CA 92093-0219 USA
pbrueggeman@ucsd.edu Tel 858/534-1230 Fax 858/534-5269
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 12 2002 - 15:54:10 PDT