Edward Vanden Berghe

Biodiversity's Big Wet Secret: The Global Distribution of Marine Biological Records Reveals Chronic Under-Exploration of the Deep Pelagic Ocean

Background Understanding the distribution of marine biodiversity is a crucial first step towards the effective and sustainable management of marine ecosystems. Recent efforts to collate location records from marine surveys enable us to assemble a global picture of recorded marine biodiversity. They also effectively highlight gaps in our knowledge of particular marine regions. In particular, the deep pelagic ocean – the largest biome on Earth – is chronically under-represented in global databases of marine biodiversity. Methodology/Principal Findings We use data from the Ocean Biogeographic Information System to plot the position in the water column of ca 7 million records of marine species occurrences. Records from relatively shallow waters dominate this global picture of recorded marine biodiversity. In addition, standardising the number of records from regions of the ocean differing in depth reveals that regardless of ocean depth, most records come either from surface waters or the sea bed. Midwater biodiversity is drastically under-represented. Conclusions/Significance The deep pelagic ocean is the largest habitat by volume on Earth, yet it remains biodiversitys big wet secret, as it is hugely under-represented in global databases of marine biological records. Given both its value in the provision of a range of ecosystem services, and its vulnerability to threats including overfishing and climate change, there is a pressing need to increase our knowledge of Earths largest ecosystem.

Data integration for European marine biodiversity research: creating a database on benthos and plankton to study large-scale patterns and long-term changes.

The general aim of setting up a central database on benthos and plankton was to integrate long-, medium- and short-term datasets on marine biodiversity. Such a database makes it possible to analyse species assemblages and their changes on spatial and temporal scales across Europe. Data collation lasted from early 2007 until August 2008, during which 67 datasets were collected covering three divergent habitats (rocky shores, soft bottoms and the pelagic environment). The database contains a total of 4,525 distinct taxa, 17,117 unique sampling locations and over 45,500 collected samples, representing almost 542,000 distribution records. The database geographically covers the North Sea (221,452 distribution records), the North-East Atlantic (98,796 distribution records) and furthermore the Baltic Sea, the Arctic and the Mediterranean. Data from 1858 to 2008 are presented in the database, with the longest time-series from the Baltic Sea soft bottom benthos. Each delivered dataset was subjected to certain quality control procedures, especially on the level of taxonomy. The standardisation procedure enables pan-European analyses without the hazard of taxonomic artefacts resulting from different determination skills. A case study on rocky shore and pelagic data in different geographical regions shows a general overestimation of biodiversity when making use of data before quality control compared to the same estimations after quality control. These results prove that the contribution of a misspelled name or the use of an obsolete synonym is comparable to the introduction of a rare species, having adverse effects on further diversity calculations. The quality checked data source is now ready to test geographical and temporal hypotheses on a large scale.

Advancing Global Marine Biogeography Research with Open-source GIS Software and Cloud Computing

Across many scientific domains, the ability to aggregate disparate datasets enables more meaningful global analyses. Within marine biology, the Census of Marine Life served as the catalyst for such a global data aggregation effort. Under the Census framework, the Ocean Biogeographic Information System was established to coordinate an unprecedented aggregation of global marine biogeography data. The OBIS data system now contains 31.3 million observations, freely accessible through a geospatial portal. The challenges of storing, querying, disseminating, and mapping a global data collection of this complexity and magnitude are significant. In the face of declining performance and expanding feature requests, a redevelopment of the OBIS data system was undertaken. Following an Open Source philosophy, the OBIS technology stack was rebuilt using PostgreSQL, PostGIS, GeoServer and OpenLayers. This approach has markedly improved the performance and online user experience while maintaining a standards-compliant and interoperable framework. Due to the distributed nature of the project and increasing needs for storage, scalability and deployment flexibility, the entire hardware and software stack was built on a Cloud Computing environment. The flexibility of the platform, combined with the power of the application stack, enabled rapid re-development of the OBIS infrastructure, and ensured complete standards-compliance.

A Census of Fishes and Everything They Eat: How the Census of Marine Life Advanced Fisheries Science

ABSTRACT The Census of Marine Life was a 10-year, international research effort to explore poorly known ocean habitats and conduct large-scale experimentation with new technology. The goal of Census 2010 in its mission statement was to describe what did live in the oceans, what does live in the oceans, and what will live in the ocean. Many of the findings and techniques from census research may prove valuable in making a transition, which many governments have publicly endorsed, from single-species fisheries management to more holistic ecosystem management. Census researchers sampled continental margins, mid-Atlantic ridges, ocean floor vents and seeps, and abyssal plains and polar seas and organized massive amounts of past and new information in a public online database called the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (www.iobis.org). The census described and categorized seamount biology worldwide for its vulnerability to fishing, advanced large-scale animal tracking with acoustic arrays and satellite a...

Bridging Disciplines to Address Complex Questions: The Need for Data Publication

Within the context of topical global issues such as climate change, loss of biological diversity, persistent contamination and depletion of marine fisheries, assessing effects of environmental chan...