IODE honours past co-chairs Sky Bristol and Eduardo Klein

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for the incredible honour of recognising the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS) and the small part I've been privileged to play in its development over the last number of years. OBIS is really an incredible network of dedicated data managers and scientists all over the world from our many participating scientific and government institutions who are bringing this capability to the world. The high quality data that dedicated individuals in the OBIS network are constantly working to standardise and bring online are enabling all manner of scientific and decision analysis, assessments of the world's ocean biodiversity resources that were not possible before OBIS existed. The trustworthy, actionable information we can develop from knowing what species are where and when through a long time series history in marine ecosystems is a vital tool in our ability to develop projections on how ecosystems may shift in future and to understand and address the rapid changes occurring on our planet. I was honoured to be a part of the community helping to grow OBIS from a research data product to a fully operational global data capability. That growth in capability maturity, in the technology but more importantly the human support infrastructure, allowed some of our US institutions to shift from running our own data infrastructure to contributing to and directly leveraging the global infrastructure supported by UNESCO-IODE. This was a huge accelerant for our efforts to use the data in analysis and decision making. Thank you, again, for the privilege of being a part of these efforts and for welcoming me and my perspectives into the IODE community.

This is very unexpected and I am very honoured that you have considered me for the IODE Achievement Award. But all the OBIS achievements were possible not because of the chairs, but because of the OBIS network, all those colleagues that work silently all around the world in the more than 30 regional OBIS nodes. Most of them with very little or no resources. These people deal with scientists, work on their datasets and do very detailed quality control of the data, format all the records into the Darwin Core standard and push the datasets to the central OBIS system. That is why we have thousands of new records coming in every week. Also, all this is possible thanks to the OBIS secretariat at the IODE Project Office in Ostend and all the supporting personnel of the IODE office, VLIZ, OceanTeacher, etc... Those guys are the real magicians behind the curtain. They keep the systems up and running, support all the activities and they are a kind of invisible force that keeps all of us together. Many thanks to all of them! This award may serve to remind us that marine biodiversity data, with all its complexities, is OCEAN DATA as well. We now have more than 75 million records and 160 million measurements or facts, and counting! Long live to OBIS! Thank you very much.