EOL is currently undertaking a Marine Theme, aiming to promote synthesis and dissemination of marine biodiversity information online worldwide.
Our goals for 2010-2013:
- To add at least 25 000 new marine species pages per year
- To add at least ten new marine LifeDesks and content partners per year
- To add at least 100 new marine curators per year
We are well into our Marine Biodiversity Theme Implementation Plan and anticipate compiling information on 90% of marine species through 2013. (click for timeline!)
We are already partnered with several major online marine biodiversity efforts and are recruiting additional marine partners, online curators and other participants. We're bringing you this information in as many media as we can think of. In addition to our species pages, please visit our Learning and Education group's One Species at a Time podcast series for recent posts about Bowhead Whales, Marine Iguanas, Chinook Salmon, Mangroves, hydrothermal vent fauna, Dinoflagellates, and Giant Squid.
Making Waves in 2010
During the International Year of Biodiversity, 2010, a perfect storm of technology, research effort, educational and conservation investments permitted us all to explore and learn about the world's oceans. Google Earth had just expanded its virtual atlas' coverage beneath the waves, making it possible to cruise the abyssal plains, poke around mid-oceanic ridges and plunge into the Mariana Trench from any internet connection.
The creation of Marine Protected Areas, which provide meaningful protection and regulation in vulnerable and important ocean habitats, has accelerated. A leader in this movement is the Deep Search Foundation. The expeditions of Dr. Sylvia Earle and her team, to key habitats they have dubbed "Hope Spots" provide information in support of research and public awareness of the oceans. They contribute information to Google Earth, and you can visit their Hope Spots via the Deep Search blog. The vision of Deep Search is to contribute to an increase in the total protected area in the ocean, and they hope to see a dramatic increase in the next ten years.Already in 2010, Costa Rica has set a dramatic example by creating a 25 000 square kilometer marine reserve around Cocos Island in the Eastern Tropical Pacific.
The Ocean featured prominently in the arts also in 2010. The feature film "Oceans" produced by Galatee Films, was released in the US by DisneyNature on Earth Day, April 22. Links to EOL appear in the "Oceans"' brochure and other documents, guiding viewers to the EOL species pages of organisms featured in the film.
The National Museum of Natural History, one of EOL's cornerstone institutions, now boasts a state-of-the-art Ocean Hall in its central exhibit space, accompanied by an online interactive exhibit, the Ocean Portal, showcasing the museum's marine collections and research. EOL has prioritized providing rich content to our pages for the species featured in these exhibits so that visitors can follow their curiosity even further. You will also find links in many EOL species pages to feature articles concerning those species in the Ocean Portal.
Citizen scientists are getting in on the action. One of the great modern conservation traditions, the BioBlitz, took to the ocean in the Spring of 2010. The US National Park Service and National Geographic teamed up for a BioBlitz of Biscayne Bay on May 1st; preliminary lists of plant and animal species show they inventoried nearly six hundred species- and counting. Check out their photo galleries for a taste of the incredible diversity of marine life.
As the first Census of Marine Life (CoML) was completed last year, many CoML projects partnered with us to disseminate the results of their work and descriptions of their species of interest. Researchers worldwide have discovered organisms previously unknown to science and in some regions the number of known species may soon be doubled.Check out the taxon pages for these CoML partners:
Arctic Ocean Diversity
Deep Water Chemosynthetic Ecosystems
Census of Marine Zooplankton
squat lobsters from the Continental Margins Census
Census of Antarctic Marine Life
Gulf of Maine Area Census
Southern Ocean polychaete worms from the Deep Sea Census
Depth range and water chemistry habitat information from the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (nearly 68 000 pages- please be patient)
The oceans are the great unexplored regions of our planet and are home to a vast array of organisms of every size, shape, and phylum. During the Year of Biodiversity 2010, EOL, our partners and the global marine research community brought many mysteries of the deep online.
Grand Challenge Questions
We hope to leverage EOL's global scale and broad scope to help the scientific and conservation communities to adress several major questions:
Marine species diversity and discovery: What is the scale of the task of marine species surveys and discovery for the future?
Climate change science: What are the marine groups and habitats most threatened by climate change? How can EOL help to identify the major risks, and aggregate the most appropriate kinds of information to help scientists identify solutions to marine climate challenges?
Conservation biology and education: How can EOL best foster increased public understanding of climate change and the importance of ocean biodiversity?
Major patterns of evolution and biogeography among the major marine groups: Is the "out-of-the tropics" model recently discovered for mollusks also characteristic of other groups? What data are needed to address global biodiversity questions?
Marine Partners
We have been fortunate to have the partnership of many scholarly and educational marine websites, now numbering more than 60 and covering organisms from all over the world and from dozens of phyla. Check out some of my favorite marine organisms on EOL.
Marine Fellows
The Rubenstein Fellows program has supported sixteen young researchers working on marine organisms and galvanizing their research communities to support dissemination of their discoveries on eol and elsewhere online. Please welcome our 2011 cohort of marine Fellows, Elizaveta, Rebecca, Francesca, Sally and André!
- Diana Marcela Bolaños Rodriguez, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
- Elizabeth Borda, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
- Simone Nunes Brandão, University of Hamburg, Germany
- Simon Coppard, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
- Melissa Frey, Marine Invasions Laboratory, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center
- Gisele Yukimi Kawauchi, Harvard University, Department of Organismic Evolutionary Biology and Museum of Comparative Zoology
- Christopher P. Kenaley, University of Washington
- Jann E. Vendetti, California State University, Los Angeles
- Gail Ashton, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center
- Kristin Hultgren, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
- Rebecca Ritger, Stanford University
- Elizaveta Ershova, University of Alaska Fairbanks
- Rebecca Johnson, California Academy of Sciences
- Francesca Leasi, Imperial College London
- Sally Rouse, Heriot Watt University, U.K.
- André Sartori, Field Museum of Natural History
Who am I?
Greetings! My name is Jen Hammock. I'm the Marine Theme coordinator here at EOL. I first got my feet wet, so to speak, in the Joint Program in Biological Oceanography at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In my doctoral research I studied olfaction (sense of smell) in marine mammals compared with their terrestrial kin. More recently I've been learning about life in the Southern Ocean while working on the Antarctic Invertebrates website at the National Museum of Natural History. I joined EOL in the Fall of 2009.
It's my job to recruit and support marine participation in EOL, so if you're a researcher, educator, student, shell collector, diver or other ocean enthusiast and you would like to get involved, email me!
Image Credits
Upper images from left to right:
- Eledone cirrhosa by Bernard Picton, Some rights reserved
- Harbor Seal by Victor Burolla, Some rights reserved
- Callophyllis laciniata by Bernard Picton, Some rights reserved
- Orangespine Unicornfish - Naso lituratus by Brian Gratwicke, Some rights reserved
- Blue Seastar by Ian Sanderson, Some rights reserved
- Nephrops norvegicus by Bernard Picton, Some rights reserved
Lower images from left to right:
- Sally Lightfoot Crab by Victor Burolla, Some rights reserved
- Haliclona viscosa by Bernard Picton, Some rights reserved
- Gymnodinium catenatum by David Patterson and Bob Andersen, Some rights reserved
- Hermodice carunculata by sarah faulwetter, Some rights reserved
- physalia physalis cumbuco brasil by Bernd Kirschner, Some rights reserved
- Humback Whale Ganesh by Dmitry Mozzherin, Some rights reserved
