OBIS-SEAMAP: The World Data Center for Marine Mammal, Sea Bird, and Sea Turtle Distributions

By Patrick N. Halpin, Andrew J. Read, E. Fujioka, B. Best, B. Donnelly, L. Hazen, Connie Y. Kot, K. Urian, E. LaBrecque, A. Dimatteo and 4 more. 2009

157 citations recorded by the source corpus.

. The science needed to understand highly migratory marine mammal, sea bird, and sea turtle species is not adequately addressed by individual data collections developed for a single region or single time period. These data must be brought together into a common, global map based on a coherent, interoperable, and openly accessible information system. This need was clearly articulated by the National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation when they co-sponsored a new effort to directly address this issue in 2002. The result is OBIS-SEAMAP: the world data-center for marine mammal, sea bird, and sea turtle information. OBIS-SEAMAP brings together georeferenced distribution, abundance, and telemetry data with tools to query and assess these species in a dynamic and searchable environment. In a second round of NOPP support that began in 2007, the National Science Foundation is helping expand this effort into new technologies and data types. To date, the OBIS-SEAMAP information system includes more than 2.2 million observation records from over 230 data sets spanning 73 years (1935–2008), and growth of this data archive is accelerating. All of these data are provided by a growing international network of individual and institutional data providers. allows the user to select different time periods to view animal observations. This selection tool also permits assessment of temporal gaps in data coverage for different species by years and by seasons.

Subfields: Ecology, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/97c6e123bb1d5c424520995d3dc2ae9bf0c711a6

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Citations in the corpus

Whales from space: Four mysticete species described using new VHR satellite imagery (2018, methodology): “Based on OBIS-SEAMAP data (Halpin et al. 2009).”
Making protected area networks effective for marine top predators (2011, background): “The accumulation and provision of open-access data from the scientific community is helping to decrease the gaps in knowledge of species ranges, needs and interactions in the light of threats and future management (e.g. OBIS-SEAMAP; Halpin et al. 2009).”
Satellite telemetry of marine megavertebrates: the coming of age of an experimental science (2009, background): “The emphasis on these species was driven by their ecological significance as top predators and by their worsening conservation status (Verity et al. 2002, BirdLife International 2004, Halpin et al. 2009).”
Satellite Tracking Sea Turtles: Opportunities and Challenges to Address Key Questions (2018, methodology): “…exist, but has not been published in peer reviewed scientific journals, may not have been uploaded to the major tracking data portals such as STAT (Coyne and Godley, 2005), Movebank (Kranstauber et al., 2011), or OBIS-SEAMAP (Halpin et al., 2006, 2009), or may not be identified in online searches.”
Spatial models for distance sampling data: recent developments and future directions (2013, background): “Spatial models allow for vast databases of spatially referenced data (e.g. OBIS-SEAMAP, Halpin et al. 2009) to be harnessed, enabling investigation of interactions between environmental covariates and population densities.”
Home on the range: spatial ecology of loggerhead turtles in Atlantic waters of the USA (2011, background): “Effective conservation planning should include spatially and temporally explicit information about target species and habitats (Hyrenbach et al., 2000; Parnell et al., 2006), and projects exist to compile these data (e.g. OBIS-SEAMAP: Halpin et al., 2009).”