Linking dimensions of data on global marine animal diversity

Recent decades have seen an explosion in the amount of data available on all aspects of biodiversity, which has led to data-driven approaches to understand how and why diversity varies in time and space. Global repositories facilitate access to various classes of species-level data including biogeography, genetics, and conservation status, which are in turn required to study different dimensions of diversity. Ensuring that these different data sources are interoperable is a challenge as we aim to create synthetic data products to monitor the state of the world’s biodiversity. One way to approach this is to link data of different classes, and to inventory the availability of data across multiple sources. Here, we use a comprehensive list of >200,000 marine animal species, and quantify the availability of data on geographic occurrences, genetic sequences, conservation assessments, and DNA barcodes across all phyla and broad functional groups. This reveals a very uneven picture: 44% of species are represented by no record other than their taxonomy, but some species are rich in data. Although these data-rich species are concentrated into a few taxonomic and functional groups, especially vertebrates, data is spread widely across marine animals, with members of all 32 phyla represented in at least one database. By highlighting gaps in current knowledge, our census of marine diversity data helps to prioritise future data collection activities, as well as emphasising the importance of ongoing sustained observations and archiving of existing data into global repositories

Development of the ENCORA portal: an internet based facility supporting EU-wide contact search for ICZM related science, practice, and policy communities

One of the main objectives of the European FP 6 Coordination action ENCORA (=European Network for Coastal Research) is to address fragmentation of and difficult communication between coastal science, practice and policy across Europe. Together with the establishment of national, thematic and affiliated networks, ENCORA developed the ENCORA Portal to support dissemination activities and to share ICZM knowledge through the Web among scientists, practitioners and policy makers (users). The ENCORA Portal was built upon existing technologies and software tools integrating three main different, interlinked database systems. The Integrated Marine Information System (IMIS) served as the searchable contact database of coastal professionals, institutes and projects. The different national and thematic ENCORA networks have started to feed the database and additionally an online edit tool is foreseen for the near future. A State of the Art Coastal Directory is embedded is the Wikipedia software and linked with the contact database. Striking about the ENCORA Portal is the link between registered users of the Coastal Wiki and the contact database, allowing only fully registered users to upload information in the Wiki Coastal Directory and hence allowing an improved authority and quality control. The link and synchronization between the different relational database systems was established through an in-house developed system and will serve as link to any future systems that may need quality control or authorization. A Thematic and National Forum which can be used as discussion and information exchange platform within the coastal community was also integrated in the Portal and is linked with the other systems. The ENCORA Portal can be consulted at http://www.encora.eu

The Canadian Register of Marine Species photo gallery: A user's guide

The Canadian portal of the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) hosts taxonomic information specific to aquatic regions in Canada. A user-contributed photogallery serves to complement the taxonomic records for Canadian regions with digital images of species. Images are also viewed by partner registers and species portals around the world. This guide will assist users with the preparation of images and related data to be uploaded to the photogallery, thereby ensuring correct species names and author credit, and facilitate discovery and browsing of taxonomic entries using this public web resource