Taxonomy
OBIS uses the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) as its taxonomic backbone. This means that the scientific names in datasets provided to OBIS are matched with WoRMS either by using the WoRMS webservices or by using the WoRMS LSID provided in the dataset. Scientific names which are marked as synonyms in WoRMS are linked to the currently accepted name.
Geography
OBIS uses geospatial data (EEZ, IHO and Marine World Heritage Site shapes) from Marine Regions. IHO geometries are used to create basin geometries, which are then intersected with EEZs in order to calculate basin specific country statistics. IHO and EEZ shapes arealso used to create ABNJ geometries. A 20 km inland buffer is added to EEZ shapes to correct for coastline inaccuracies. The Ecologically or Biologically Significant Areas (EBSA) shapes were provided by the Duke University Marine geospatial Ecology Lab.
Conservation status
The conservation status of a species on the OBIS taxon pages is based on the IUCN Red List.
Invasiveness
The IUCN Global Invasive Species Database is used to label species as invasive on the OBIS taxon pages.
Harmful micro algae
The IOC-UNESCO Taxonomic Reference List of Harmful Micro Algae is used to label species as a harmful micro algae on the OBIS taxon pages.
Environmental data
The environmental data we use are downloaded from BioOracle using the sdmpredictors R package. See the data preparation code at https://github.com/iobis/xylookup/blob/master/dataprep/rasters.py for more details. Code for fetching the environmental conditions by location are available at https://github.com/iobis/xylookup.
