Putting biodiversity data to work for marine environmental policy
Exploration of our oceans continues apace, but past and ongoing surveys have already left us with a vast legacy of biodiversity data. OBIS, the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (iobis.org) contains >40 million records of marine organisms from all of the world’s marine regions, while WoRMS, the World Register of Marine Species (marinespecies.org) catalogues >220,000 species. In Sheffield we are developing the computational tools to visualise and analyse these data. This is feeding in to global assessments (e.g. WOA, the UN’s World Ocean Assessment, worldoceanassessment.org) and regional policy (e.g. MERP, the NERC/Defra Marine Ecosystems Research Programme, marine-ecosystems.org.uk).