How can you contribute data to EurOBIS?
Everyone collecting in situ data (in contrast to experimental data) on the occurrences of marine and brackish water species in Europe, or worldwide when affiliated with a European project, person or institute, can make a valuable contribution to EurOBIS.
EurOBIS welcomes data and information collected for various purposes:
- Research data
- Monitoring data
- Museum collection data
- Literature-based data
The level of detail in contributed data can differ, depending on what was collected or can be published online.
EurOBIS welcomes the following data:
- Presence and absence data
- Abundance data
- Biomass data
- Related biological data, such as length measurements and DNA sequences
- Related environmental data, such as sediment characteristics, temperature and salinity
Your data should contain information on:
- Taxonomic coverage
- Geographical coverage
- Temporal coverage
Preferred submission route
The preferred format for submitting data to EurOBIS, OBIS, EMODnet Biology and GBIF is a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A). If you are not familiar with this format, these resources can help you prepare your data:
Darwin Core Archives can be created and published using an Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT). You can use the EurOBIS IPT, although submissions from any IPT instance running in production mode are accepted.
For instructions on using the EurOBIS IPT, see the IPT User Manual.
Alternative submission routes
If providing a Darwin Core Archive is not possible, you can use one of the following alternatives:
Online dataset submission form
The online dataset submission form can be used for data in these formats:
- Excel spreadsheet (.xls, .xlsx)
- Access database (.mdb, .accdb)
- Comma- or tab-separated values (.csv)
- Text file (.txt)
Email submission
If your data do not meet the requirements of the submission form, contact us at info@eurobis.org. Our team will help find a suitable solution for ingesting your data. We recognise that meeting submission requirements is not always straightforward and try to accommodate different situations.
What happens after submission?
After submission, the data management team will:
- Make the metadata publicly available
- Process the data
- Run quality-control procedures and provide feedback to the data provider
- Publish the data online
- Inform the data provider about the quality-control results and publication
For further information or additional explanation, contact info@eurobis.org or consult the FAQ for data providers.
By making your data available through EurOBIS, it will also become available through OBIS, EMODnet Biology and GBIF.
Help us build a robust system that supports marine science by sharing your data with us!
