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The OBIS and GOOS joint efforts to connect marine biodiversity data to global Ocean observation.
22 October 2025
Photo: The Ocean Image Bank / Jordan Robins
Understanding and protecting the Ocean requires interconnecting many observation layers across fields and disciplines. At Living Data 2025, OBIS, GOOS, MBON, and GBIF co-hosted a dedicated session exploring how integrating biological, biogeochemical, and physical observations can transform our collective capacity to observe and understand the Ocean.
Combining physical, biogeochemical, and biological observations is essential to understand, monitor, and predict changes in the Ocean. Physical and chemical variables reveal how the Ocean changes, while biological and ecological observations show what these changes concretely mean to marine life. The complex interactions between marine life and its environment call for a holistic, data-based observing approach to support effective management and drive efficient policy responses. As part of the data ecosystem of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO, OBIS and GOOS are collaborating to ensure that high-quality marine biological and ecological observations flow seamlessly into global data systems, delivering crucial insights to those who need them the most. Through its community, GOOS defines the needs and the frameworks for coordinated and sustained Ocean observation, while OBIS operationalises the marine biodiversity data component.
Since 2012, GOOS has been collaborating with the global Ocean observing community to deliver data across twelve Biology and Ecosystem Essential Ocean Variables (BioEco EOVs). The BioEco EOVs are a core set of measurements needed to observe the state of marine biodiversity and monitor its changes through key indicators, from microbes to mangroves. GOOS defines and coordinates this global set of Essential Ocean Variables that includes the BioEco EOVs, providing a common framework that allows scientists worldwide to compare results and measure changes in the Ocean state.
OBIS provides the data backbone that sustains the BioEco EOVs, making them standardized, FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable), and connected across scales, from local datasets to global indicators. This includes labelling and tagging OBIS datasets using relevant BioEco EOVs, making biodiversity information more actionable for science and decision-making. OBIS is also leading the development of the GOOS BioEco Metadata Portal, which employs a “linked-data architecture” to create an accessible and interoperable “delivery platform” for the BioEco EOV observing programmes. The portal enables users to visualize where sustained observations of the BioEco EOVs are taking place, which protocols are used, who the contact people are, and where the data is stored and is accessible or not. Soon, datasets in OBIS will include a link to those observing programmes. It also highlights the crucial role of researchers and institutions contributing to each variable.
Through the integration of the BioEco EOVs from local sources into a global, quality-controlled, standardized system, OBIS provides a data backbone that makes the biodiversity-related EOVs measurable and comparable at all scales.
With their collaboration, OBIS and GOOS aim to strengthen the flow of marine biological and ecological observations into global data systems, providing crucial insights to a wide range of users, from decision-makers seeking science-based evidence to support their conservation action to coastal communities whose livelihoods depend on informed resource management. Together, GOOS and OBIS reinforce the IOC data ecosystem, connecting the BioEco EOVs with broader data networks and integrating them into a well-structured, operational clearing-house mechanism that supports the sustainable observation and management of marine life around the world.
