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The OBIS Species Distribution Maps, a reliable marine biodiversity foresight solution, is an important tool for Ocean protection. Using cutting-edge model-based capacities, the OBIS Species Distribution Map allows marine planners and decision-makers to identify, better manage and protect the biodiversity-rich areas of tomorrow’s Ocean. Developed as a key component of the ambitious EU-funded MPA Europe project, the OBIS Species Distribution Map brings many advances, such as the integration of the five latest IPCC climate change scenarios, at an unparalleled resolution. As a marine biodiversity foresight solution, the OBIS Species Distribution Map fully supports crucial global biodiversity objectives such as achieving the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework “30x30” target. To explore how the OBIS Species Distribution Map can support marine conservation, we spoke with Silas Principe, a modeling expert at OBIS.
The OBIS Species Distribution Maps are at the heart of the MPA Europe project’s innovative approach. The project integrates blue carbon storage estimations, ocean connectivity, climate velocity, and marine biodiversity predictions into a prioritization tool, providing a holistic vision that supports decision-makers in implementing future Marine Protected Areas. This holistic approach translated into a challenging requirement for the OBIS team to match the project’s ambitions.
The OBIS team first produced models to determine species and habitat ranges. These models integrated high-resolution biodiversity information, including species occurrence records and environmental variables provided by Bio-ORACLE–a partner in the MPA Europe project. “Thanks to this data, we managed to get down to a 5 x 5 kilometres resolution for our maps, something unattainable just a few years ago,” explains Silas Principe. The team then forecasted species and habitat distribution in the future, using five climate scenarios based on the most recent IPCC assessments. With this addition, users can explore, in a few clicks, the potential impact of climate change on biodiversity in an area. “This, again, is a first in Europe, at that resolution, for such a wide range of species and habitats,” reminds Silas Principe.
Integrating marine habitats and how they are disturbed by climate change ensures that future users have the holistic insights they need to make informed decisions. “The combination of habitat, species and climate change scenarios is a powerful resource and a fantastic tool for marine biodiversity foresight, especially for the often neglected habitat part”, explains Silas Principe. “Habitats are vital to ecosystems’ health and essential to biodiversity resilience. Habitat-forming species, such as cold coral gardens, maerl beds, seagrass meadows, polychaetes aggregations and mussel beds, are critical to the life of many other marine species.”
The OBIS team successfully modeled and integrated over 12,500 species found in Europe into the Species Distribution Map. “Initially, we aimed at modeling 25,000 species, but we had to lower our ambitions a bit due to the lack of data,” explains Silas Principe. “This was probably our biggest challenge in this project. To start using the data as valid input for our model, we need about 30 records per species in one area. In some areas, we simply didn’t have enough records. Hence, the need to scale down the number of species covered in the project, at least for now!”
Modeling Nature is an inherently complex process. “A species distribution model gives a general idea of the areas a species can inhabit. But in reality, there are innumerable nuances, complexities, and exceptions that we cannot incorporate into our models,” explains Silas Principe. There are also places where we have no data or only very few observations, creating potential bias. Some areas are heavily overrepresented due to frequent data collection, often due to an easy-to-access location. In contrast, other regions are drastically underrepresented, with only a handful of observations recorded over several decades. If left unaddressed, these biases can misleadingly suggest that some species are concentrated in specific locations.
To overcome these limitations, the OBIS modeling team deployed many strategies. “You can always improve a model,” confides Silas Principe with a smile. To create the healthiest base possible for their model, the OBIS team ensured to input the highest-quality data, integrating datasets from OBIS and GBIF, two of the most comprehensive global sources of biodiversity data. The team then implemented quality control steps to filter the data, clean it from geographical or environmental outliers, and set up post-evaluation checks, using specific parameters such as species thermal range to verify the model’s products. The team also took the decision to only model species with sufficient data, applying thresholds to evaluate the feasibility of including each of the 25,000 species initially targeted. Finally, the OBIS team is currently testing their products against other existing models, such as Aqua Maps, to see if the results are converging and to confirm—or not—that the models are progressing in the right direction. “These tests are essential because each model is unique and can produce subtle nuances from which we can learn,” says Silas.
Embracing Open Science is a fundamental part of OBIS culture and the foundation for building trust in what the infrastructure produces. “We injected that spirit in the MPA Europe project,” says Silas Principe. “We harness the scientific community’s collective expertise by opening our model to experts and researchers to test the maps and provide feedback on the insights we generated. This improves our workflows’ robustness and reinforces our developments’ reliability.” All the components developed for the Species Distribution Map are open-source and accessible to everyone. Anyone can explore the maps created, download the data used by the OBIS team, and even run the model on their own computer with their own configurations and settings. “As part of the MPA Europe deliverables, we will publish a scientific paper to document and share our methods, ensuring they are peer-reviewed,” says Silas Principe. To go further, the team is now exploring the possibility of integrating the community’s assessments into the model through a labelling system. The system would indicate when the community verified and approved a product to reinforce trust in the produced outputs.
The Species Distribution Map is now being integrated into a prioritization tool developed by the NORD University in Norway. “We are very close to completion and realize how much impact our developments will have on marine planners’ work,” says Silas Principe. “It’s an exciting phase because, after months of effort, we are finally close to a tangible delivery: a fit-for-purpose, state-of-the-art, and accessible tool that will increase our capacity to better protect our Ocean.” Upcoming July (2025), the whole MPA Europe team will participate in the International Conference on Marine Protected Areas in Marine Spatial Planning (MPA-MSP) in Bodø, Norway, to present the prioritization output, demonstrate it to future users and gather their feedback. At that stage, the MPA Europe prioritization tool will be able to propose the most valuable European marine areas to protect based on a combination of biodiversity importance and blue carbon stock potential.
Moreover, the OBIS team’s models developed for the MPA Europe project are adaptable. They can be applied to any region in the world to contribute to predicting biodiversity under climate change pressures. OBIS is currently developing additional powerful solutions to support evidence-based decision-making. Pieter Provoost, OBIS Data manager, has developed a product that aggregates OBIS and GBIF marine data into a gridded version with a high resolution that covers much of the ocean. “With millions of new records submitted to OBIS by researchers worldwide every month, we are step-by-step covering more places from where we previously had no or little information about marine biodiversity, “ concludes Silas. “And that’s a victory for the Ocean.”
You can access the OBIS Species Distribution Maps here: https://shiny.obis.org/distmaps/
You can access the OBIS Species Grid here: https://github.com/iobis/speciesgrids