Geoschemes Marine Domain Task Group

Conveners

• Nicolas Bailly - FishBase/SeaLifeBase, Q‑quatics, Philippines; Beaty Biodiversity Museum and Sea Around Us, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
• Serge Gofas - Universidad de Málaga, Málaga, Spain
• Britt Lonneville - Marine Regions, Flanders Marine Institute, Oostende, Belgium

Core members

• Visotheary Ung - ISYEB, CNRS/Muséum national d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France

Motivation

This task group is created within the interest group “Geoschemes” and aims to establish a worldwide set of geographic units for recording marine biota, which would parallel the existing WGSRPD (World Geographic Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions, Brummitt et al., 1992; 2001).
Despite the increasing prevalence of georeferenced species occurrence data, an area-based scheme is still needed with two main purposes (1) to represent historical occurrence data (including type localities) which are originally expressed as an area (typically, as the name of a country) and (2) to provide bounding boxes for the retrieval of georeferenced data in the form of national or regional checklists. The existing area-based scheme of “Marine Ecoregions of the World” (Spalding et al., 2007), despite having been extensively used for marine biogeographical analysis (615 papers cited in Google Scholar) is unsatisfactory precisely because it ignores political boundaries.
Therefore, like for the terrestrial system, we believe that a set of marine geounits bound to political borders should better meet the needs of end-users. Biogeographic considerations should also be taken into account in order to subdivide large or complex EEZs e.g. countries with several maritime facades. In addition to the countries’ jurisdictional waters, the High Seas should be accounted for using the proposals of This task group is focused on the marine domain, but we work closely with its sibling Task Group “Geoschemes: Terrestrial Domain”, to produce a coherent system of global coverage.

Strategy

Within the sphere of the GeoSchemes interest group, a proposal for a worldwide coverage of the World Ocean has been produced for level 4 and is ready to be presented for feedback on https://github.com/tdwg/geoschemes/tree/main/marine. Shapefiles are available for all proposed units and were derived from the Flanders Marine Institute (2019). Maritime Boundaries Geodatabase: Maritime Boundaries and Exclusive Economic Zones (200NM), version 11, available online at https://www.marineregions.org/ (https://doi.org/10.14284/386). The expected chronogram includes having this proposal subject to feedback from any interested parties during at least one year, before being formally submitted.

Goals, Outputs and Outcomes

The final proposal should be submitted as a standard documentation in SDS form, as TDWG procedure requires. Standard abbreviations for proposed geounits are to be produced. In addition to the GitHub repository, the complete set of geounits should be hosted on the Marine Regions website and thereby provide the needed tool for display of distributions in the World Register of Marine Species.

It is also planned to provide ancillary materials supporting the proposal, including shapefiles and kml files (which are not to be part of the proposed standard) and relevant literature.

Becoming involved

Please email the convener to express your interest in participating. Please describe your affiliation(s) and any relevant skills or resources you can bring to the effort.
The task group intends to conduct written exchanges via the TDWG workspace in Slack (geoschemes), via the Geoschemes workspace in Google Drive <https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/15-XuMAuNj3mXSgFfzQ5teNvplxvR4LTb> and through the email, and to reflect advances, issues and current state of work through its GitHub section.

References

• Brummitt, R.K., Pando, F., Hollis, S., Brummitt, N.A. (2001). World geographical scheme for recording plant distributions. Edit. 2. TDWG Standard no2. Pittsburg (PA, USA): Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University. https://web.archive.org/web/20160125135239/http://www.nhm.ac.uk/hosted_sites/tdwg/TDWG_geo2.pdf
• Hollis, S. & R.K. Brummitt. 1992. World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions. TDWG Standard no2. Pittsburgh (PA, USA): Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University.
• Spalding, M. D., Fox, H. E., Allen, G. R., Davidson, N., Ferdaña, Z. A., Finlayson, M. A. X., … Robertson, J. (2007). Marine ecoregions of the world: a bioregionalization of coastal and shelf areas. BioScience, 57, 573-583. Available from https://doi.org/10.1641/B570707
• Watling, L., Guinotte, J., Clark, M. R., & Smith, C. R. (2013). A proposed biogeography of the deep ocean floor. Progress in Oceanography, 111:, 91-112. Available from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pocean.2012.11.003