Leen Vandepitte

Biological and ecological traits of marine species

This paper reviews the utility and availability of biological and ecological traits for marine species so as to prioritise the development of a world database on marine species traits. In addition, the ‘status’ of species for conservation, that is, whether they are introduced or invasive, of fishery or aquaculture interest, harmful, or used as an ecological indicator, were reviewed because these attributes are of particular interest to society. Whereas traits are an enduring characteristic of a species and/or population, a species status may vary geographically and over time. Criteria for selecting traits were that they could be applied to most taxa, were easily available, and their inclusion would result in new research and/or management applications. Numerical traits were favoured over categorical. Habitat was excluded as it can be derived from a selection of these traits. Ten traits were prioritized for inclusion in the most comprehensive open access database on marine species (World Register of Marine Species), namely taxonomic classification, environment, geography, depth, substratum, mobility, skeleton, diet, body size and reproduction. These traits and statuses are being added to the database and new use cases may further subdivide and expand upon them.

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.

To connect or not to connect? Floods, fisheries and livelihoods in the Lower Rufiji floodplain lakes, Tanzania

Abstract For seven years, village-based recorders monitored fish catches and water levels in seven floodplain-associated lakes of the Lower Rufiji, Tanzania. The lakes differ in the number of days and volume of inflows from the river, and thus provide a natural experiment to explore the links between catch composition, income per hour of fishing (IPHF) and hydrological connectivity, and to analyse the response of the users. The fishers adapt their fishing mode and equipment to achieve a rather constant IPHF of between 0.2 and 0.8 US

Dispersal similarly shapes both population genetics and community patterns in the marine realm

/fisher/hour. In situations of low connectivity, during a series of drought years, the less well-connected lakes lost many species and became a virtual monoculture of Oreochromis urolepis. Only in one extreme case was average fish size significantly reduced, indicating a high fishing pressure. Catch was therefore highly resilient to shifts toward illegal, non-selective and active fishing techniques. Fish diversity and lake productivity were quickly re-established when the larger lakes reconnected. The potential impacts of changes in the flood hydrograph (through dams, increased abstraction or climate/land-use changes) are assessed, and management options discussed. Editor: D. Koutsoyiannis; Guest editor: M.C. Acreman Citation Hamerlynck, O., Duvail, S., Vandepitte, L., Kindinda, K., Nyingi, D.W., Paul, J.-L., Yanda, P.Z., Mwakalinga, A.B., Mgaya, Y.D. and Snoeks, J., 2011. To connect or not to connect? Floods, fisheries and livelihoods in the Lower Rufiji floodplain lakes, Tanzania. Hydrological Sciences Journal, 56 (8), 1436–1451.

Fishing for data and sorting the catch: assessing the data quality, completeness and fitness for use of data in marine biogeographic databases

Dispersal plays a key role to connect populations and, if limited, is one of the main processes to maintain and generate regional biodiversity. According to neutral theories of molecular evolution and biodiversity, dispersal limitation of propagules and population stochasticity are integral to shaping both genetic and community structure. We conducted a parallel analysis of biological connectivity at genetic and community levels in marine groups with different dispersal traits. We compiled large data sets of population genetic structure (98 benthic macroinvertebrate and 35 planktonic species) and biogeographic data (2193 benthic macroinvertebrate and 734 planktonic species). We estimated dispersal distances from population genetic data (i.e., FST vs. geographic distance) and from β-diversity at the community level. Dispersal distances ranked the biological groups in the same order at both genetic and community levels, as predicted by organism dispersal ability and seascape connectivity: macrozoobenthic species without dispersing larvae, followed by macrozoobenthic species with dispersing larvae and plankton (phyto- and zooplankton). This ranking order is associated with constraints to the movement of macrozoobenthos within the seabed compared with the pelagic habitat. We showed that dispersal limitation similarly determines the connectivity degree of communities and populations, supporting the predictions of neutral theories in marine biodiversity patterns.

Toward a new data standard for combined marine biological and environmental datasets - expanding OBIS beyond species occurrences

Being able to assess the quality and level of completeness of data has become indispensable in marine biodiversity research, especially when dealing with large databases that typically compile data from a variety of sources. Very few integrated databases offer quality flags on the level of the individual record, making it hard for users to easily extract the data that are fit for their specific purposes. This article describes the different steps that were developed to analyse the quality and completeness of the distribution records within the European and international Ocean Biogeographic Information Systems (EurOBIS and OBIS). Records are checked on data format, completeness and validity of information, quality and detail of the used taxonomy and geographic indications and whether or not the record is a putative outlier. The corresponding quality control (QC) flags will not only help users with their data selection, they will also help the data management team and the data custodians to identify possible gaps and errors in the submitted data, providing scope to improve data quality. The results of these quality control procedures are as of now available on both the EurOBIS and OBIS databases. Through the Biology portal of the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet Biology), a subset of EurOBIS records—passing a specific combination of these QC steps—is offered to the users. In the future, EMODnet Biology will offer a wide range of filter options through its portal, allowing users to make specific selections themselves. Through LifeWatch, users can already upload their own data and check them against a selection of the here described quality control procedures. Database URL: www.eurobis.org (www.iobis.org; www.emodnet-biology.eu/)

Methods for the Study of Marine Biodiversity

The Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) is the world’s most comprehensive online, open-access database of marine species distributions. OBIS grows with millions of new species observations every year. Contributions come from a network of hundreds of institutions, projects and individuals with common goals: to build a scientific knowledge base that is open to the public for scientific discovery and exploration and to detect trends and changes that inform society as essential elements in conservation management and sustainable development. Until now, OBIS has focused solely on the collection of biogeographic data (the presence of marine species in space and time) and operated with optimized data flows, quality control procedures and data standards specifically targeted to these data. Based on requirements from the growing OBIS community to manage datasets that combine biological, physical and chemical measurements, the OBIS-ENV-DATA pilot project was launched to develop a proposed standard and guidelines to make sure these combined datasets can stay together and are not, as is often the case, split and sent to different repositories. The proposal in this paper allows for the management of sampling methodology, animal tracking and telemetry data, biological measurements (e.g., body length, percent live cover, ...) as well as environmental measurements such as nutrient concentrations, sediment characteristics or other abiotic parameters measured during sampling to characterize the environment from which biogeographic data was collected. The recommended practice builds on the Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) standard and on practices adopted by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). It consists of a DwC Event Core in combination with a DwC Occurrence Extension and a proposed enhancement to the DwC MeasurementOrFact Extension. This new structure enables the linkage of measurements or facts quantitative and qualitative properties to both sampling events and species occurrences, and includes additional fields for property standardization. We also embrace the use of the new parentEventID DwC term, which enables the creation of a sampling event hierarchy. We believe that the adoption of this recommended practice as a new data standard for managing and sharing biological and associated environmental datasets by IODE and the wider international scientific community would be key to improving the effectiveness of the knowledge base, and will enhance integration and management of critical data needed to understand ecological and biological processes in the ocean, and on land.

A decade of the World Register of Marine Species – General insights and experiences from the Data Management Team: Where are we, what have we learned and how can we continue?

Recognition of the threats to biodiversity and its importance to society has led to calls for globally coordinated sampling of trends in marine ecosystems. As a step to defining such efforts, we review current methods of collecting and managing marine biodiversity data. A fundamental component of marine biodiversity is knowing what, where, and when species are present. However, monitoring methods are invariably biased in what taxa, ecological guilds, and body sizes they collect. In addition, the data need to be placed, and/or mapped, into an environmental context. Thus a suite of methods will be needed to encompass representative components of biodiversity in an ecosystem. Some sampling methods can damage habitat and kill species, including unnecessary bycatch. Less destructive alternatives are preferable, especially in conservation areas, such as photography, hydrophones, tagging, acoustics, artificial substrata, light-traps, hook and line, and live-traps. Here we highlight examples of operational international sampling programmes and data management infrastructures, notably the Continuous Plankton Recorder, Reef Life Survey, and detection of Harmful Algal Blooms and MarineGEO. Data management infrastructures include the World Register of Marine Species for species nomenclature and attributes, the Ocean Biogeographic Information System for distribution data, Marine Regions for maps, and Global Marine Environmental Datasets for global environmental data. Existing national sampling programmes, such as fishery trawl surveys and intertidal surveys, may provide a global perspective if their data can be integrated to provide useful information. Less utilised and emerging sampling methods, such as artificial substrata, light-traps, microfossils and eDNA also hold promise for sampling the less studied components of biodiversity. All of these initiatives need to develop international standards and protocols, and long-term plans for their governance and support.

World Register of Marine Species

The World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2017. WoRMS is a unique database: there is no comparable global database for marine species, which is driven by a large, global expert community, is supported by a Data Management Team and can rely on a permanent host institute, dedicated to keeping WoRMS online. Over the past ten years, the content of WoRMS has grown steadily, and the system currently contains more than 242,000 accepted marine species. WoRMS has not yet reached completeness: approximately 2,000 newly described species per year are added, and editors also enter the remaining missing older names–both accepted and unaccepted–an effort amounting to approximately 20,000 taxon name additions per year. WoRMS is used extensively, through different channels, indicating that it is recognized as a high-quality database on marine species information. It is updated on a daily basis by its Editorial Board, which currently consists of 490 taxonomic and thematic experts located around the world. Owing to its unique qualities, WoRMS has become a partner in many large-scale initiatives including OBIS, LifeWatch and the Catalogue of Life, where it is recognized as a high-quality and reliable source of information for marine taxonomy.