MedOBIS (EUROBIS)

An attempt to collect, format, analyse and disseminate surveyed marine biological data deriving from the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea region is currently under development at the Hellenic Center for Marine Research (HCMR, Greece). The effort has been supported by the MedOBIS project (Mediterranean Ocean Biogeographic Information System) and has been carried out in cooperation with the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki (Greece), the National Institute of Oceanography (Israel) and the Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas (Ukraine).

The aim is to develop a taxon-based biogeography database and online data server with a link to survey and provide satellite environmental data. Currently, the primary features of the MedOBIS application are its offline GIS data formatting capabilities and its online Java and JavaScript enabling data server with taxon-based search, mapping and data downloading capabilities. In its completion, the MedOBIS online marine biological data system (http://www.iobis.org/OBISWEB/ObisDynPage1.jsp?content=meta/42.html) will be a single source of biological and environmental data (raw and analysed) as well as an online GIS tool for access of historical and current data by marine researchers. It will function as the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea node of EurOBIS (the European node of the International OBIS initiative, part of the Census of Marine Life).

INTRODUCTION

The international and interdisciplinary nature of the biological degradation issue as well as the technological advances of the Internet capabilities allowed the development of a considerable number of interrelated online databases. The free dissemination of valuable historical and current biological, environmental and genetic information has contributed to the establishment of an interdisciplinary platform targeted towards information integration at regional and also at global scales and to the development of information-based management schemes about our common interest.

The spatial component of these data has led to the integration of the information by means of the Geographic Information System (GIS) technology. The latter is widely used as the natural framework for spatial data handling (Wright & Bartlett 1999, Valavanis 2002). GIS serves as the basic technological infrastructure for several online marine biodiversity databases available on the Internet today. Developments like OBIS (Ocean Biogeographic Information System, "http://www.iobis.org/"), OBIS-SEAMAP (Spatial Ecological Analysis of Megavertebrate Populations, "http://seamap.env.duke.edu/") and FIGIS (FAO Fisheries Global Information System, http://www.fao.org/fishery/figis) facilitate the study of anthropogenic impacts on threatened species, enhance our ability to test biogeographic and biodiversity models, support modelling efforts to predict distribution changes in response to environmental change and develop a strong potential for the public outreach component. In addition, such online database systems provide a broader view of marine biodiversity problems and allow the development of management practices that are based on synthetic analysis of interdisciplinary data (Schalk 1998, Decker & O'Dor 2002, Tsontos & Kiefer 2002).

Towards this end, a development of a new online marine biological information system is presented here in its initial phase. MedOBIS (Mediterranean Ocean Biogeographic Information System) intends to assemble, formulate and disseminate marine biological data for the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea regions focusing on the assurance and longevity of historical surveyed data, the assembly of current and new information and the dissemination of raw and integrated biological and environmental data and future products through the Internet.

MedOBIS DESCRIPTION

MedOBIS current development consists of four main phases (Fig. 1). The data assembly phase is based on the free contribution of biological data from various national and international scientific surveys in the region. The data formatting phase is based on a GIS (ESRI, 1994), under which the geographic location of data stations is used to convert station data and their attributes to GIS shapefiles. The data analysis phase is based on data integration through GIS and spatial analyses (e.g. species distribution maps, species-environment relations, etc). Finally, the dissemination phase is based on ALOV Map, a free portable Java application for publication of vector and raster maps to the Internet and interactive viewing on web browsers. It supports navigation and search capabilities and allows working with multiple layers, thematic maps, hyperlinked features and attributed data.

During the on-going data assembly phase, a total number of 776 stations with surveyed benthic biological data was employed. These data include mainly benthic species abundance (for nearly 3000 benthic organisms), benthic substrate types and several environmental parameters. Currently, 100 stations have been assembled for the Ionian Sea, 570 stations for the Aegean Sea and 106 stations for the Black Sea. The temporal resolution of these data extends for the period 1937-2000 while most data cover the period 1986-1996. Additionally, monthly satellite images of sea surface temperature (SST) and chlorophyll (Chl-a) were assembled for the period 1998-2003. Satellite data were obtained from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR SST) and the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS Chl-a).

During the data formatting phase, all assembled surveyed stations were converted to a GIS shapefile (Fig. 2). This GIS information layer includes the geographic coordinates of the stations as well as stations' identification number. Station data attributes were organised in an MS Access Database while satellite data were embedded in a GIS database as GIS regular grids. The MedOBIS data analysis phase is still at the initial stage. Several off line analytical published efforts (e.g. Arvanitidis et al. 2002, Valavanis et al. 2004a,b,c) will be included in the MedOBIS development, which mainly focus on species distribution maps, mapping of productive oceanic processes and species-environment interactions.

The MedOBIS dissemination phase ("http://www.medobis.org/") is based on ALOV Map ("http://www.alov.org/"), a joint project of ALOV Software and the Archaeological Computing Laboratory, University of Sydney, Australia. ALOV Map is a Java-based application for publication of GIS data on the Internet and interactive viewing on web browsers. ALOV Map is designed to display geographical information stored in shapefiles or in any SQL database or even in an XML (Extensible Markup Language) document serving as a database. MedOBIS uses ALOV Map's full capabilities and runs in a client-server mode (Fig. 3). ALOV Map is connected to an MS Access database via a servlet container. This architecture was needed to connect the biological data with the spatial data and facilitate search options, such as, which species are found at which stations. Additionally, a JavaScript code is invoked, which searches the data, pops up a window with the results and then shows the relevant stations on the map.

To provide a taxon-based search capability to the MedOBIS development, the sampling data as well as the relevant spatial data are stored in the database, so taxonomic data can be linked with the geographical data by SQL (Structured Query Language) queries. To reference each species to its location on the map, the database queries are stored and added to the applet as individual layers. A search function written in JavaScript searches the attribute data of that layer, displays the results in a separate window and marks the matching stations on the map (Fig. 4). Finally, selecting several stations by drawing a zooming rectangle on the map provides a list with predefined themes from which the user may select more information (Fig. 5).

CURRENT LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE PLANS

A disadvantage of embedding information from the database as a layer is the relatively long download time due to the current MedOBIS-ALOV Map client-server architecture. An appropriate solution would be a direct search on the server side, which will allow partial data downloading to the client side. This work will be embedded in the MedOBIS application in the future (client-side architecture), when the size of assembled data becomes relatively 'heavy' for the current client-server architecture. This is an on-going process, since the MedOBIS initiative has been endorsed by the "Excellence of the Institute of Marine Biology of Crete (IMBC) in Marine Biodiversity", a Hellenic National Project that has been evaluated and approved by European experts. As more data will be assembled in time-series databases, an additional future work will include the development of MedOBIS data analysis phase, which is planned to include GIS modelling/mapping of species-environment interactions.

Size reference: 2953 species; 776 stations

[Source: The information provided in the summary was extracted from the MarBEF Data System at "http://www.marbef.org/data/eurobisproviders.php"]