Ifremer BIOCEAN database (Deep Sea Benthic Fauna)

The Biocean database was designed to gather the extremely large volume of data collected from different deep-sea ecosystem studies conducted by Ifremer's department of "Environnement Profond" and aims at facilitating ecosystem studies in the deep sea. It represents an important new resource for deep-sea ecologists and will have wide applications in biogeography, and biodiversity studies.. The relational database is available online and contains data covering 30 years of French deep-sea oceanographic research.

This database comes in a six-application package; two of them are used on research vessels to collect operational data, whereas the others are used to link with a core database back on land. The latter are used to: (1) manage the taxonomic nomenclature, (2) monitor the identification of faunal collections and (3) fill in chemical analyses results or measurement data files (4) add or extract data from the database. BIOCEAN was designed to facilitate ecosystem studies in the deep sea. 24,426 records representing 3,156 species are present. Faunal collection with traditional gear (cores and trawls), submersible Nautile and ROV Victor (Remotely Operated Vehicle). Habitats covered include:deep-water benthic ecosystems including hydrothermal vents, cold seeps, deep-coral reefs and sediments.

Size reference: 23876 distribution records collected in 69 cruises, 3170 species

BIOCEAN database is open to anyone. Taxonomical and biogeographical data are opened through different web portals:
-OBIS, Ocean Biogeographique Information System, CoML (Census of Marine Life) web portal.
-EurOBIS, the European Ocean Biogeographique Information System.
-SCAR-MarBIN, the Marine Biodiversity Information Network, Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, International Council for Science.