The European Ocean Biodiversity Information System (EurOBIS) Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary: Where Did It Start, and What Have We Learned?

The European Ocean Biodiversity Information System (EurOBIS) was established in 2004, as part of the Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning European Union Network of Excellence (MarBEF) project. One of the key project tasks was to integrate different resources on marine biodiversity. This gave birth to EurOBIS, a data system to capture, integrate and present distribution of marine species from individual datasets. Integration and consolidation aimed to provide a better understanding of long-term, large-scale patterns in European marine waters. The first marine biogeographic data went live in August 2004, and its data content has been growing steadily. The general EurOBIS goal is to help fill gaps in our scientific knowledge by making diverse biogeographic data on marine species freely available and accessible online. It is part of the OBIS network, focusing on data collected within European marine waters, or collected by European researchers and institutes outside Europe. EurOBIS closely collaborates with other regional OBIS nodes in Europe. Over time, EurOBIS formed alliances with European initiatives as a supporting infrastructure and network, including serving as the backbone of the European Marine Observations and Data Network Biology (EMODnet Biology) since 2009 (Perez Perez et al. 2023) and being part of the central LifeWatch Species Information Backbone since 2014. Both projects ensure a constant flow of marine species occurrence data to EurOBIS. Nowadays, European Horizon project calls include a clause requiring that marine data generated within these projects need to become part of European data flows, specifically becoming part of EMODnet. This involves an increase in needed support of the EurOBIS Data Management Team (DMT), and additional training of data providers on how to deal with marine biodiversity data to make them suitable for a (semi-)automated flow to EMODnet Biology. These needs are addressed in several ways, ranging from in-person data training to online training courses being offered through the Ocean Teacher Global Academy (OTGA). The EurOBIS infrastructure is dynamic, keeping track of recent developments in the field of data formats and standards, compatible with DarwinCore (DwC) (Wieczorek et al. 2012). While EurOBIS started out as capturing presence and abundance data of species, it follows trends and needs in biodiversity informatics, allowing it to deal with all biodiversity-related measurements and DwC changes, includi