News
The OBIS Executive Committee (EC) held its 7th session online on 14 and 23 July 2025, bringing together Co-Chairs of the Coordination Groups and the Secretariat. The meeting reviewed progress, addressed current challenges, and set priorities for the year ahead.
Despite significant budgetary constraints, OBIS continues to grow and innovate thanks to strong community engagement and project support, such as the partnership with the Minderoo Foundation in eDNA Expeditions Phase 2. The Executive Committee welcomed the development of the soon-to-be-deployed redesigned OBIS website featuring major user-facing improvements such as expanded search functions, dataset tags for filtering content based on its type or provenance and a prototype DOI registration tool to ensure visibility and attribution for derived datasets. The EC also positively welcomed the inclusion of OBIS data in the Amazon Web Services Open Data programme, which supports accessibility while easing the pressure of hosting costs on the infrastructure’s budget.
The Coordination Groups reported steady progress following their work plans. The Product Coordination Group is finalizing an OBIS Products Catalogue to showcase OBIS data products and boost uptake. The Data Coordination Group is advancing work on long-term data archiving, DNA data guidelines, and Darwin Core Data Package integration. The Nodes Coordination Group is continuing its efforts to tighten the OBIS Community through engagement efforts such as the launch of a monthly newsletter for the OBIS Nodes, the initiation of a Node-to-Node Support Programme, and strengthening multilingual outreach.
The Committee also highlighted major opportunities for visibility in the months ahead. OBIS will play a prominent role at the Datos Vivos/Living Data 2025 conference and at SG-OBIS-13 in Bogotá this October, with multiple sessions and structured community reporting. Looking further ahead, the EC emphasized “community-first” priorities: supporting peer-to-peer learning, ensuring visibility of contributions, and securing resources to sustain OBIS’s core functions. Actions are already underway for SG-OBIS-14 in Bruges in 2026, which will be held back-to-back with the 7th World Conference on Marine Biodiversity.
Read the full report here: https://oceanexpert.org/document/37059