{"title":"Prioritisation of ocean biodiversity data collection to deliver a sustainable ocean.","authors":"Amelia E H Bridges, Kerry L Howell","doi":"10.1038/s43247-025-02442-7","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Fundamental ecological questions about the distribution of ocean life remain unanswered, hindering both the effective management of the ocean, and our comprehension of life on this planet. The benthic and pelagic realms are subject to different methods of study, and to understand where to best focus effort, a thorough understanding of existing information is required, allowing identification of critical knowledge gaps. Open-access data repositories provide a valuable means to identify such gaps; however, these repositories are subject to challenges in separating benthic from pelagic data. Here we demonstrate an automated data pipeline for extracting and separating benthic from pelagic data in open-access repositories. By stratifying data against essential ocean variables in a critical gap analysis, we show that large spatial and taxonomic biases exist in both the benthic and pelagic global datasets, favouring depths shallower than ~100 m, the northern hemisphere, and vertebrate species. The newly compiled, cleaned, and classified dataset is used to identify areas of chronic under sampling and high-priority regions for exploration. We argue that coordinated strategic prioritisation of sampling is needed to support modelling and prediction, enabling us to better manage our oceans and comprehend life on Earth.</p>","PeriodicalId":10530,"journal":{"name":"Communications Earth & Environment","volume":"6 1","pages":"473"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9000,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12176621/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Communications Earth & Environment","FirstCategoryId":"93","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02442-7","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"地球科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2025/6/18 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Fundamental ecological questions about the distribution of ocean life remain unanswered, hindering both the effective management of the ocean, and our comprehension of life on this planet. The benthic and pelagic realms are subject to different methods of study, and to understand where to best focus effort, a thorough understanding of existing information is required, allowing identification of critical knowledge gaps. Open-access data repositories provide a valuable means to identify such gaps; however, these repositories are subject to challenges in separating benthic from pelagic data. Here we demonstrate an automated data pipeline for extracting and separating benthic from pelagic data in open-access repositories. By stratifying data against essential ocean variables in a critical gap analysis, we show that large spatial and taxonomic biases exist in both the benthic and pelagic global datasets, favouring depths shallower than ~100 m, the northern hemisphere, and vertebrate species. The newly compiled, cleaned, and classified dataset is used to identify areas of chronic under sampling and high-priority regions for exploration. We argue that coordinated strategic prioritisation of sampling is needed to support modelling and prediction, enabling us to better manage our oceans and comprehend life on Earth.
期刊介绍:
Communications Earth & Environment is an open access journal from Nature Portfolio publishing high-quality research, reviews and commentary in all areas of the Earth, environmental and planetary sciences. Research papers published by the journal represent significant advances that bring new insight to a specialized area in Earth science, planetary science or environmental science.
Communications Earth & Environment has a 2-year impact factor of 7.9 (2022 Journal Citation Reports®). Articles published in the journal in 2022 were downloaded 1,412,858 times. Median time from submission to the first editorial decision is 8 days.