Taxonomic editors plan a World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS)

An authoritative register of all marine species is urgently required to facilitate biological data exchange and management, integration of biological with other ocean data, and to allow taxonomists to focus on describing new species instead of overlooking recently described species and correcting past nomenclatural confusion (Costello et al., 2006). Its production has added benefits in fostering collaboration between experts at a global scale. Easy access to encourages submissions of overlooked species to the list. In turn, this stimulates biogeographic and evolutionary research

Ocean Biodiversity Informatics - an emerging field of science

‘Ocean Biodiversity Informatics’ (OBI) heralds a new era in biological research and management that is revolutionising the way we approach marine biodiversity research. OBI uses computer technology to manage marine biodiversity information (capturing, storing, searching for, retrieving, visualising, mapping, modelling, analysing and publishing data). This allows more users better and faster access to biodiversity information than ever before. The global nature of phenomena such as climate change, over-fishing, and other changes in ecosystems, would not have been recognised had it not been for informatics-aided analyses.The prospect of data mining and exploration on a global scale is enough to gladden the hearts of marine scientists across the world, as marine biology embraces the computer age. Access to global data through OBI will allow for worldwide gap analysis resulting in new perspectives on current research, the promotion of collaborations between research groups and real data sets for teaching purposes, to mention just a few of the potential benefits. OBI is an initiative of the 21st century and will make conventional marine biodiversity research more dynamic and comprehensive, with a range of constantly evolving online tools

Proceedings Ocean Biodiversity Informatics: International Conference on Marine Biodiversity Data Management, Hamburg, Germany 29 November to 1 December, 2004

The International conference on Marine Biodiversity Data management ‘Ocean Biodiversity Informatics’ was held in Hamburg, Germany, from 29 November to 1 December 2004. Its objective was to offer a forum to marine biological data managers to discuss the state of the field, and to exchange ideas on how to further develop marine biological data systems. Many marine biologists are actively gathering knowledge, as they have been doing for a long time. What is new is that many of these scientists are willing to share their knowledge, including basic data, with others over the Internet. Our challenge now is to try and manage this trend, avoid confusing users with a multitude of contradicting sources of information, and make sure different data systems can be and are effectively integrated

The universal instability in optimised stellarators

In tokamaks and neoclassically optimised stellarators, like Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) and the Helically Symmetric Experiment, turbulent transport is expected to be the dominant transport mechanism. Among the electrostatic instabilities that drive turbulence, the trapped-electron mode (TEM) has been shown both analytically and in simulations to be absent over large ranges of parameter space in quasi-isodynamic stellarator configurations with the maximum- property. It has been proposed that the reduction of the linear TEM growth rate in such configurations may lead to the passing-electron-driven universal instability, which is often subdominant to the TEM, becoming the fastest-growing instability over some range of parameter space. Here, we show through gyrokinetic simulations using the Gene code, that the universal instability is dominant in a variety of stellarator geometries over a range of parameter space typically occupied by the TEM, but most consequentially in devices which possess beneficial TEM stability properties like W7-X, which locally satisfies the maximum- property for deeply trapped particles in the regions of worst curvature. We find that the universal instability exists at long perpendicular wavelengths and, as a result, dominates the potential fluctuation amplitude in nonlinear simulations. In W7-X, universal modes are found to differ in parallel mode structure from trapped-particle modes, which may impact turbulence localisation in experiments.</p