OBIS is a global open-access data and information clearing-house on marine biodiversity for science, conservation and sustainable development. VISION: To be the most comprehensive gateway to the world’s ocean biodiversity and biogeographic data and information required to address pressing coastal and world ocean concerns. MISSION: To build and maintain a global alliance that collaborates with scientific communities to facilitate free and open access to, and application of, biodiversity and biogeographic data and information on marine life. More than 20 OBIS nodes around the world connect 500 institutions from 56 countries. Collectively, they have provided over 45 million observations of nearly 120 000 marine species, from Bacteria to Whales, from the surface to 10 900 meters depth, and from the Tropics to the Poles. The datasets are integrated so you can search and map them all seamlessly by species name, higher taxonomic level, geographic area, depth, time and environmental parameters. OBIS emanates from the Census of Marine Life (2000-2010) and was adopted as a project under IOC-UNESCO’s International Oceanographic Data and Information (IODE) programme in 2009. Objectives - Provide world’s largest scientific knowledge base on the diversity, distribution and abundance of all marine organisms in an integrated and standardized format (as a contribution to Aichi biodiversity target 19) - Facilitate the integration of biogeographic information with physical and chemical environmental data, to facilitate climate change studies - Contribute to a concerted global approach to marine biodiversity and ecosystem monitoring, through guidelines on standards and best practices, including globally agreed Essential Ocean Variables, observing plans, and indicators in collaboration with other IOC programs - Support the assessment of the state of marine biological diversity to better inform policymakers, and respond to the needs of regional and global processes such as the UN World Ocean Assessment (WOA) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) - Provide data, information and tools to support the identification of biologically important marine and coastal habitats for the development of marine spatial plans and other area-based management plans (e.g. for the identification of Ecologically or Biologically Significant marine Areas (EBSAs) under the Convention on Biological Diversity. - Increase the institutional and professional capacity in marine biodiversity and ecosystem data collection, management, analysis and reporting tools, as part of IOC’s Ocean Teacher Global Academy (OTGA) - Provide information and guidance on the use of biodiversity data for education and research and provide state of the art services to society including decision-makers - Provide a global platform for international collaboration between national and regional marine biodiversity and ecosystem monitoring programmes, enhancing Member States and global contributions to inter alia, the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) and the Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS)

GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, is an international network and data infrastructure funded by the world's governments and aimed at providing anyone, anywhere, open access to data about all types of life on Earth. Coordinated through its Secretariat in Copenhagen, the GBIF network of participating countries and organizations, working through participant nodes, provides data-holding institutions around the world with common standards and open-source tools that enable them to share information about where and when species have been recorded. This knowledge derives from many sources, including everything from museum specimens collected in the 18th and 19th century to geotagged smartphone photos shared by amateur naturalists in recent days and weeks. The GBIF network draws all these sources together through the use of data standards, such as Darwin Core, which forms the basis for the bulk of GBIF.org's index of hundreds of millions of species occurrence records. Publishers provide open access to their datasets using machine-readable Creative Commons licence designations, allowing scientists, researchers and others to apply the data in hundreds of peer-reviewed publications and policy papers each year. Many of these analyses, which cover topics from the impacts of climate change and the spread of invasive and alien pests to priorities for conservation and protected areas, food security and human health, would not be possible without this. GBIF arose from a 1999 recommendation by the Biodiversity Informatics Subgroup of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Megascience Forum. This report concluded that "An international mechanism is needed to make biodiversity data and information accessible worldwide", arguing that this mechanism could produce many economic and social benefits and enable sustainable development by providing sound scientific evidence.

Accredited through the MEDIN partnership, and core-funded by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Scottish Government, DASSH provides tools and services for the long-term curation, management and publication of marine species and habitats data, within the UK and internationally. Below are a selection of projects, outputs and deliverables that DASSH and the MBA Data Team have been involved in recently. - NE Data Management: DASSH have been contracted by the Marine team at Natural England (NE) to support NE data dissemination. We have been digitising datasets used in Article 17 reporting and helping them input data to Marine Recorder and MEDIN guidelines. In addition, DASSH is running a 2-day workshop with the marine data team in October 2014 on data management and standards. The aims of the workshop are to present MEDIN data guidelines and standards and to run practicals on quality assurance (QA) issues with data, creating MEDIN formatted data, and creation of MEDIN metadata. - MCZ Data Archiving: DASSH staff have been working with Defra, JNCC, Natural England, Cefas and the other MEDIN DAC's in the development and implementation of a strategy for the archiving and dissemination of MCZ survey data. This involves the archives of many terrabytes of data from the survey work undertaken at 127 sites. DASSH is currently working with the other DACs archiving the data from several MCZ sites before taking delivery of the complete survey catalogue. - Non-Natives Data Management: DASSH staff work with other members of the KE team to help deliver the MBA contribution to the GB Non-native Species Information Portal. The data team ensure the validation of records submitted and raise alerts when records of Invasive Non-Native Species of concern and in disseminating information about species distribution via DASSH and the NBN. DASSH staff continue to liaise with organisations to ensure the prompt flow of marine non-native species distribution data to the public domain. The KE team facilitated the identification of two new marine invasive non-native species in 2014 and have subsequently created the identification sheet for these species. Hemigrapsus sanguineus (from volunteer records sent in for identification) and Hemigrapsus takanoi (first recorded by the John Bishop Group survey team). - EMODNet Biology: The Data Team are part of a consortium led by the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) for the biological data component of EMODNet (European Marine Observation and Data Network). The Data Team will lead a work package relating to biological traits and indicator species as identified for Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) reporting, bringing an additional €130k of funding. - VALMER: The Data Team led a key work package in a £3.7 million (ca. €260k for the MBA) INTERREG project to "Develop, trial and refine methodologies that will be used to quantify and communicate the value (economical, social and environmental) of marine and coastal ecosystem services". The research identified an operational framework to value marine ecosystem services, and which could be used to enhance marine planning and policy decisions.

Several climate indices, regarding Atlantic Basin: - North Atlantic Oscillation - Southern Oscillation Index - Bivariate ENSO Timeseries - Tropical Northern Atlantic Index - Tropical Southern Atlantic Index - Oceanic Niño Index - Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI V2) - North Tropical Atlantic SST Index - ENSO precipitation index - Northeast Brazil Rainfall Anomaly - Solar Flux (10.7cm) - Global Mean Lan/Ocean Temperature

The Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity (KNB) is an international repository intended to facilitate ecological and environmental research. The KNB was launched in 1998 with a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), with the purpose of being the long term home for synthesis datasets and research products generated by National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) working groups. Since then, NCEAS has continued to operate the KNB not only as an archive for NCEAS working group products, but also for the broader ecology and environmental science community. The KNB acceps all environmental or ecological related data and publishes datasets with Digital Object Identifiers for the express purpose of ensuring long-term access to these datasets. We strive to abide by FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, resuble) principles of data sharing and preservation. For scientists, the KNB is an efficient way to share, discover, access and interpret complex ecological data. Due to rich contextual information provided with KNB data, scientists are able to integrate and analyze data with less effort. The data originate from a highly-distributed set of field stations, laboratories, research sites, and individual researchers. The foundation of the KNB is the rich, detailed metadata provided by researchers that collect data, which promotes both automated and manual integration of data into new projects.

This is the FAO Fishery and Aquaculture Reference Data repository: Codes and reference data for fishing gear, species, currencies, commodities, countries and others.

The EMODnet Bathymetry portal is operated and further developed by a European partnership. This comprises members of the SeaDataNet consortium together with organisations from marine science, the hydrographic survey community, and industry. The partners combine expertises and experiences of collecting, processing, and managing of bathymetric data together with expertises in distributed data infrastructure development and operation and providing OGC services (WMS, WFS, and WCS) for viewing and distribution. SeaDataNet is a leading infrastructure in Europe for marine & ocean data management, initiated and managed by the National Oceanographic Data Centres (NODC's). It is actively operating and further developing a Pan-European infrastructure for managing, indexing and providing access to ocean and marine data sets and data products, acquired via research cruises and other in-situ observational activities. The basis of SeaDataNet is interconnecting Data Centres into a distributed network of data resources with common standards for metadata, vocabularies, data transport formats, quality control methods and flags, and access. SeaDataNet is aiming for an extensive coverage of available data sets for the various marine environmental disciplines, such as physical oceanography, marine chemistry, biology, biodiversity, geology, geophysics and bathymetry. This is implemented by seeking active cooperation at a national scale with institutes and at a European scale with communities, that are engaged in data management for these disciplines, and by seeking opportunities for including their data centres and data collections in the SeaDataNet metadata and data provision.

Stakeholder networks from 32 countries united to collaborate on Ocean Action, Climate Action, addressing pollution from land-based, riverine and marine-based sources and advancing Circular Economy development. International Waste Platform provides international expertise and launches joint initiatives; It supports advancing solutions to mitigate the global waste, plastic pollution & climate crises which are interlinked. Representatives committed themselves to align objectives, to support the implementation of strategies of Ocean Action and Climate Action, as well as to share ideas, best practices, concepts, programs, knowledge and opportunities; including the reduction of plastic debris at the source, before it enters rivers and the coastal environment. Country / regional networks and national marine debris networks make a difference in societal behaviour change and environmental policies by providing input and promoting action which aims at finding solutions to reduce (ocean) plastic pollution. Country and regional networks are instrumental to reach the prevention and reduction of marine pollution, facilitate and foster the establishment of national and international partnerships in a multi-stakeholder approach.

EMODnet Biology provides three keys services and products to users. 1)The data download toolbox allows users to explore available datasets searching by source, geographical area, and/or time period. Datasets can be narrowed down using a taxonomic criteria, whether by species group (e.g. benthos, fish, algae, pigments) or by both scientific and common name. 2) The data catalogue is the easiest way to access nearly 1000 datasets available through EMODnet Biology. Datasets can be filtered by multiple parameters via the advanced search from taxon, to institute, to geographic region. Each of the resulting datasets then links to a detailed fact sheet containing a link to original data provider, recommended citation, policy and other relevant information. Data Products - EMODnet Biology combines different data from datasets with overlapping geographic scope and produces dynamic maps of selected species abundance. The first products are already available and they focus on species whose data records are most complete and span for a longer term.

The Ocean Action Hub is an open, interactive website providing information and promoting action globally to support the implementation of SDG 14: Life below Water before 2030. The Hub was initiated by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), in partnership with the Governments of Sweden and Fiji, to facilitate multistakeholder engagement as part of the Ocean Conference process. The Hub hosted online discussions on ocean issues as an input into the development of the 1st Ocean Conference "Call for Action" in 2017, and facilitated co-development of solutions and voluntary commitments by multi-stakeholders, as well as providing a space for connecting and sharing ideas. In the run-up to the 2nd Ocean Conference the Hub continues to be maintained as a central source for information on implementation of SDG 14. The ocean plays a key role in the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The ocean covers nearly three quarters of the Earth’s surface and contributes substantially to human development, including to the provision of food security, transport, energy supply, tourism and many of the planet’s most critical ecosystem services (carbon and nutrient cycling, climate regulation, oxygen production). The market value of marine and coastal resources and industries is approximately USD 3 trillion per year, or 5 percent of global GDP. Yet, today it is estimated that 40 per cent of our oceans are heavily affected by unsustainable practices, including over-fishing, land-based sources of pollution, habitat destruction, invasive species and climate change, particularly ocean acidification. SDG 14: Life below Water aims to address these threats.