EurOBIS – EMODnet Biology

Marine Biodiversity

About

EMODnet Biology is the thematic lot within the EMODnet service focused on providing open and free accessible and free data and data products on the temporal and spatial distribution of various marine species across European regional seas and European extraterritorial waters. The taxonomic structure of EMODnet Biology relies on the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) and shares the data infrastructure within the European node of the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (EurOBIS, www.eurobis.org). Specifically, within the Blue-Cloud Data Discovery & Access Service, the federation includes the EurOBIS service.

Type and number of data sets

EurOBIS, established in 2004 by the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) under the MarBEF project, and is the OBIS node responsible for the publication of biogeographic data collected within European marine waters, as well as by European researchers and institutes worldwide. Its primary focus lies in cataloging taxonomy and occurrence records over space and time, offering various online tools for data querying and visualisation.

Current Federation

As June 2026, EurOBIS/EMODnet Biology hosts about 1,500 datasets encompassing more than 77,000 accepted species names included in more than 57 million occurrence records. Initially, the DCAT service of the EurOBIS IPT (Integrated Publishing Toolkit) was used as it provided Ecological Metadata Language (EML) metadata output. As part of Blue-Cloud2026 optimisation,  Blue-Cloud used a newly-established OAI- PMH service of EurOBIS and MarineInfo. As  the semantic interoperability requirements have been further developed by Blue Cloud, work is going for the EurOBIS metadata records to be available also via a JSON-LD service. This service is now covering all published EurOBIS/EMODnet Biology datasets. Since 2025, the data and metadata published via the EurOBIS portal and EMODnet Biology data are also available on the EDITO data lake.

Function in Blue-Cloud

The EurOBIS data is used in the Blue-Cloud VLabs ‘Zoo and Phytoplankton EOV products’ and ‘CarbonPlankton Dynamics’. The collaboration with Blue-Cloud enables the search for EurOBIS biodiversity data through the Blue-Cloud Discovery and Access Service and facilitates their utilization within the Blue-Cloud Virtual Research Environment (VRE).