Making Biological Data Widely Accessible
Making Biological Data Widely Accessible
Posted March 28, 2020In order to make biological data sets widely accessible from global platforms, such as the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS), data need to be aligned to a framework called the Darwin Core Standard. Data standards ensure a clear understanding of how the data are represented and make them easy to access, filter, and query, allowing for easy dissemination and sharing among multiple platforms and users. PacIOOS supported efforts to add data collected by the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program of NOAA’s Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, Ecosystem Sciences Division to OBIS. Data of stratified random surveys (StRS) of reef fish in the U.S. Pacific Islands were collected between 2007-2019 and accounted for 828 different species in the Hawaiian and Mariana Archipelagos, American Samoa, and the Pacific Remote Island Areas.
Another data set that is made available is the Rapid Ecological Assessments of Fish Large-Area Stationary Point Count Surveys (SPC) at Coral Reef Sites across the Pacific Ocean from 2000 to 2007, also collected by the Coral Reef Ecosystem Program of NOAA’s Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center. The reef fish surveys were conducted in the Hawaiian and Mariana Archipelagos, American Samoa, and the Pacific Remote Island Areas to catalog the diversity (species richness), abundance (numeric density) and biomass (fish mass per unit area) of diurnally active reef fish assemblages in shallow-water (typically 10-15m, always less than 30m) hard-bottom habitats.
