News

Report of the 9th Session of the OBIS steering group, 17-20 November 2020 (Online)

Report

Executive Summary

Fifty-eight participants from 25 countries participated in the 9th session of the IODE Steering Group for OBIS (SG-OBIS) on 17-20 November 2020. The session was held online. Despite the COVID19 pandemic´s impact, a record amount of new records was published in OBIS in the past year (6 million presence records from 574 new datasets). This year, we also celebrated our 20th anniversary and changed our name into the Ocean Biodiversity (replacing biogeographic) Information System.

At the 9th session we discussed and agreed on our 2021 work plan. Some of the important activities in 2021 are: the data quality control tools and QC reporting will be further developed, including a registry of recommended vocabulary terms used for measurements and sampling facts. A new project team has been established to report back on recommended data integration workflows for DNA-sequence derived records, including agreements on genetic data standards in collaboration with the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) and the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC). Agreeing on these practices for molecular biodiversity data is also essential for managing the data resulting from the Pacific Islands Marine Bioinvasions Alert Network (PacMAN) project. PacMAN is a new 3-year project led by OBIS and funded by the Flanders/UNESCO Trust Fund for the Support of UNESCO’s Activities in the Field of Science (FUST) and aims to build a national early-detection/early-warning monitoring system of marine invasive species in Fiji, in close collaboration with the University of the South Pacific and local (government) stakeholders.

A new project team on the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development has been established to support the development of a Decade programme proposal on Observing Life in the Ocean in collaboration with MBON, GOOS BioEco and UNEP-WCMC. The OBIS Strategic Advisory Task Team will develop a roadmap and architectural plan for the next generation international OBIS infrastructure (OBIS3.0), taking into account the continuing increases in demand for new features and services (expected to increase also under the Ocean Decade), and ensure keeping up with the accelerating pace of technological developments.

OBIS will work closer with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) for example in areas of capacity development (developing training material on marine cases), harmonizing data publication and interaction between OBIS nodes and GBIF nodes, in data standard developments and representing the biodiversity data informatics community in international fora.

In dealing with the COVID19 pandemic the internal communication between the OBIS nodes and with the secretariat increased through weekly and monthly video conferences and using Slack as our new communications platform. One positive effect was that as this year’s meeting was held online, we had the best-attended meeting so far.

The OBIS steering group is a very large group (more than 50 members) and the cost and carbon footprint of in-person meetings is considerable, so we decided to hold the next session again as an online meeting on 30 November - 3 December 2021 and organize one extra short interim SG-OBIS online meeting on 26-27 May 2021.

We heartily thanked Mr Sky Bristol who served us as our OBIS co-chair in the past 4 years and welcomed Mr Anton Van de Putte as the new incoming SG-OBIS co-chair.