The world data center for marine mammal, sea Bird, and sea turtle distributions

. 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.

The world data center for marine mammal, sea Bird, and sea turtle distributions N o P P s P e c i a l i s s u e » d ata / i N F o r m at i o N / P r o d u c t d e V e l o P m e N t aBstr act. 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 , 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.
Partnership Program (NOPP) and the System (Grassle and Stocks, 1999;Zhang and Grassle;2002;Costello and Vanden Berghe, 2006), the worldwide information system for all marine taxa initiated by the Census of Marine Life (CoML; Ausubel, 1999). The second part of the acronym, "SEAMAP, " refers to the specialized Spatial Ecological Analysis of Marine-megavertebrate Animal Populations node of this larger global ocean information system (Halpin et al., 2006). OBIS-SEAMAP (http://seamap. env.duke.edu ) brings together georeferenced distribution and abundance data and tools to query and assess these species in a dynamic and searchable environment ( Figure 1). To date, the global OBIS-SEAMAP information system includes more than 2.2 million observation records from over 230 data sets spanning 73 years , and growth of this data archive is accelerating ( Figure 2). All of these data are provided Other example projects include ongoing annual global assessments of the status of sea turtles and plotting the spatial and temporal trends of nesting data (Hutchinson et al., 2005;Mast et al., 2006 (1) data management, (2) value added, and (3) community development.
data management services are designed to facilitate the integration of the various data sets into the OBIS-SEAMAP database. These services assist with: quality assurance and quality control (e.g., speed filters to identify erroneous locations along a survey track); dissemination (e.g., tools to share and disseminate research results with colleagues and founders); information technology benefits (e.g., data backup in the OBIS-SEAMAP server); and advertising (e.g., high visibility of individual data sets and supporting citations on the public OBIS-SEAMAP Web site as well as the OBIS portal and other metadata clearinghouses).
Value-added services enrich the data sets contributed to OBIS-SEAMAP in a variety of ways, including: providing additional ancillary data (e.g., automatic

Integrated Taxonomic Information
System-a taxonomic hierarchy for species recorded in contributed data sets); developing metadata to        (Redfern et al., 2006). We are expanding the capabilities of OBIS-SEAMAP to display the results of environmental model outputs along with detailed methodological and statistical metadata so that users can interpret and appropriately use model outputs in a responsible manner.
Given the complexity and variety of model outputs and methods, we will develop a metadata structure for fully describing the methods used as well  as summarizing subsets of results in a meaningful way. The environmental modeling field is experiencing rapid advances in data exchange standards coincident with the emergence of enabling technologies (Argent, 2004;Frehner and Brandli, 2006;Raskin and Pan, 2005). We are using emerging XML standards, such as the Ecological Metadata Language and Semantic Web, for this task.

Future tecHNoloGy treNds
We are developing innovations in six focus areas at this time: to convert stored metadata into the necessary formats, and we regularly update these metadata clearinghouses.
imProViNG data quality Recent reviews of marine fish data found in global information systems have highlighted the need to develop better methods for data quality control in contributed information systems (Robertson, 2008). The OBIS-SEAMAP program strives to provide the highestquality data available in the most objective and transparent manner possible.
A fundamental quality-control design built into OBIS-SEAMAP is very basic: instead of pooling data from potentially uneven sources, our system emphasizes the selection of complete data sets of known quality and also emphasizes direct communications and collaboration with the original data providers.