Way back in 1999, Jesse Ausubel, Fred Grassle, Mark Costello, Edward van den Berghe, James Edwards and others began to envisage an on-line ocean biogeographical information system (OBIS) to enable researchers and resource managers, within a few years, to select any area or volume of water on a global map and bring up information as to what has been reported to live there. Developed as the data portal for the Census of Marine Life program (2000-2010), by 2010 OBIS had several million what/where records for over 120,000 species. OBIS now contains over 109 million records from over 180,000 species, about 70% of described marine species, and offers wonderful data access, archiving, and visualization.
Today, thanks to software wizardry and persistence of Dr. Steven Formel, Science Analytics and Synthesis team within the U.S. Geological Survey, and PHE’s Mark Stoeckle, OBIS and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) contain their pioneering eDNA (marine genomic) datasets, derived from the paper Mark co-authored about fish diversity in coastal New Jersey.
Here are links to the datasets:
GBIF: https://www.gbif.org/dataset/46488f96-b51e-4c06-9a02-8c4c900f7f78
OBIS: https://obis.org/dataset/fe2ed263-2b21-47d7-a79f-f9b911132398
OBIS and GBIF expose slightly different sets of metadata. One can even access a single ASV from a single library. Here is an example; the DNA-derived data are in the table at the bottom: https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/4126398311
Thanks, Steve and Mark, for making this a historic day in the advancement of marine bioinformatics.