News

10th Session of the OBIS steering group, 17-20 May 2022 (Online)

Report

Executive Summary

Forty-four participants from 23 countries representing 26 OBIS nodes participated in the 10th session of the IODE Steering Group for OBIS (SG-OBIS) on 17-20 May 2022. The session was held online.

Since last year (May 2021) OBIS published 21.55 million new taxon occurrence records from 409 new datasets, 17 million new measurements and 4,900 new marine species. OBIS now has a total of 100 million records, 180 million measurements or facts, 4,471 datasets and 160,000 marine species. A large part of this (exponential) growth can be assigned to the new capability at OBIS to deal with DNA derived data, which accounts for 14.6 million records.

The OBIS secretariat grew from 3 to 5 staff members and now has dedicated capacity to (i) support the various OBIS task teams, (ii) develop more training resources, (iii) actively support science capacity building on the ground with two eDNA projects (one in Pacific Islands to monitor marine invasive species and a global one in UNESCO’s World Heritage marine sites to monitor biodiversity and vulnerability to climate change) and (iv) support the Global Ocean Observing System by providing a portal and helpdesk to monitor the status of the biological ocean observing system. These extrabudgetary projects also provide necessary resources for further technological developments of the global data system, such as a bioinformatics pipeline to manage species occurrences based on DNA sequences.

The OBIS steering group adopted the 2022 work plan. Among many other things, OBIS will submit a UN Ocean Decade project proposal and develop recommendations for historical data and data from archaeological and paleontological sources through a new OBIS Historical Data Project Team (HDPT). GBIF is currently exploring a new data model for a unified common model capable of supporting expanded data-publishing capabilities. A new OBIS Grand Unified Data Model Project Team (GUMPT) has been formed to provide direction and guidance into how the model can best represent OBIS community data and an opportunity for OBIS to prepare for this new direction.

The OBIS steering group stressed the importance of being recognized as the marine network in GBIF as well as having all marine biodiversity data published in both GBIF and OBIS. It agreed on a single publishing workflow, which should lead to a better synchronization of marine data in both GBIF and OBIS.

The OBIS steering group regretted the severe budget cuts to our parent programme IODE, which impacts the ability to execute our work and urged Member States and donors to provide financial support to OBIS.

The 11th SG-OBIS session will take place as a hybrid event on 16-19 May 2023.