Alasdair McIntyre: Life in the World's Oceans
7.2 SeamountsOnline
Providing Researchers and Managers with Tools for Finding and Accessing Information on the Biological Communities That Live on Seamounts
Since 2005, SeamountsOnline (Stocks 2009) has been collecting data on species that have been recorded from seamounts globally, and making them available through a free online data portal (Fig. B7.2). By bringing together global seamount data into a standardized, searchable, electronic format, SeamountsOnline facilitates research and management objectives looking at patterns across different seamounts and regions.
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Fig. B7.2 SeamountsOnline is a free online data portal that makes available global data on species that have been recorded from seamounts (seamounts.sdsc.edu, see also its sister database SeamountCatalog at earthref.org/cgi-bin/er.cgi?s=sc-s0-main.cgi). |
Through a map interface, users can select seamounts of interest, or see the distribution of taxa globally. Users can search for information by management boundaries, such as Exclusive Economic Zones, and biogeographic regionalizations, such as Longhurst Provinces. Seamounts can also be searched by summit depth. Taxonomic searching has options for searching by phylum, class, order, or family, in addition to genus or species. All species observations in SeamountsOnline are also contributed to the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (www.iobis.org), which integrates data from across all the Census of Marine Life projects.
