OBIS NOAA US node UNESCO
Miami, 6 December 2023, Ms Audrey Azoulay, the UNESCO Director General, announced a joint collaboration between NOAA, USGS, NPS and OBIS to support activities such as the management of Marine Protected Areas.
With the United States having rejoined UNESCO, we look forward to continued support of the partnership’s commitment to cooperate in ocean science and the observation of marine life, and in particular, the United States, through the work of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS, which also hosts the US OBIS node) aim to further enhance cooperation with UNESCO on the exchange of scientific knowledge, expertise, and best practices in ocean biological observations, in particular through platforms like UNESCO/IOC’s biology and ecosystems portal of the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) and the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS).
This includes strengthened coordination of advancements and integration of both traditional and emerging technologies, such as environmental DNA, underwater acoustics, imaging, and remote sensing, into the observation system. Joint work will include developing automated data flow pipelines to publish various marine life observations, including coral reef monitoring, animal telemetry, passive acoustics, and eDNA data to OBIS.
Increasing the public availability of records on marine biodiversity, including taxonomy, abundance, and ecological observations will provide more comprehensive characterizations of marine ecosystems necessary for better understanding and management of our natural capital that sustains life on Earth.
The joint statement can be found on the UNESCO website at https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/unesco-noaa-and-usgs?hub=701
OBIS
UNESCO’s Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS) integrates 123 million observations of 180,000 marine species and grows with approximately one million marine species observations per month. Of those, United States based institutions contributed 27 million records (fig. 1). Within U.S. marine waters, OBIS received 1,218 datasets provided by over 140 U.S. institutions, which accounts for 15.7 million records of 34,000 marine species (fig. 2).
Figure 1. World map of U.S. data contribution to OBIS: currently 27 million marine species observations are published in OBIS that involved U.S. based institutions, source UNESCO/IOC’s Ocean Biodiversity Information System (https://obis.org)
GOOS BioEco Portal
The Biology and Ecosystems Portal of UNESCO/IOC’s Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) (https://bioeco.goosocean.org) serves as an open access, online platform that the ocean observing community can use to discover information on marine biological and ecosystem observations generated by long-term programmes. The portal holds information on 66 biological monitoring programs in U.S. marine waters (Fig. 1). Ensuring sustained, systematic observation of the biology and ecosystem Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs) established by the GOOS Biology and Ecosystem Panel is of particular importance for documenting marine life status and trends, especially when integrated with measures of ocean physics and chemistry. The United States contribution to the Global Ocean Observing System, the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS), is an important component of the global UNESCO-IOC effort to develop Essential Ocean Variables. U.S. IOOS regional partners and thematic networks (Animal Telemetry Network, Marine Biodiversity Observation Network) facilitate collection of marine life information as well as permanent data archival at National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) and data sharing through OBIS and the GOOS BioEco portal.
Figure 2. Map of marine species observations (15.7 million records) in the U.S. EEZ and active long-term biological monitoring programmes (66 programmes) overlapping with the U.S. EEZ, source: UNESCO/IOC’s GOOS BioEco Portal (https://bioeco.goosocean.org), UNESCO/IOC’s Ocean Biodiversity Information System (https://obis.org), Marine Regions (https://marineregions.org).