News
The Oceans Past Initiative (OPI) is a global research network for marine historical research. Their goal is to enhance knowledge and understanding of how the diversity, distribution and abundance of marine life in the world’s oceans has changed over the long term to better indicate future changes and possibilities, and to contribute to the sustainable use of marine systems.
OPI is essentially aiming at contributing the historical biogeographic data (contained at HMAP Data Pages) to OBIS as a tier-3 OBIS node under EurOBIS and can contribute in data standard and best practice setting for historical biodiversity data. So far there are 22 HMAP datasets in OBIS, containing >300,000 records with the oldest records dating back to 1753.