ZooBase: Global Marine Zooplankton Species Occurrences

ZooBase is a global dataset of marine zooplankton species occurrences compiled by Fabio Benedetti of ETH Zurich. It aggregates presence data for key zooplankton groups from sources including OBIS, GBIF, and specific research initiatives. The data was retrieved in April 2018 and underwent quality filtering for spatial coordinates, sampling date, depth, and species-level identification.

Use Cases

• Modeling global zooplankton species distributions based on occurrence records.
• Analyzing community composition and diversity of marine zooplankton groups mentioned in the description.
• Studying the spatial overlap of species observations between major biodiversity databases like OBIS and GBIF.
• Investigating bathymetric patterns in zooplankton occurrence based on the described depth filtering.

Strengths

• Focuses on major zooplankton groups comprising the bulk of extant oceanic communities, as listed in the description.
• Integrates data from multiple authoritative sources: OBIS, GBIF, Cornils et al. (2018), and the MAREDAT initiative.
• Applied quality filters for missing coordinates, incomplete dates, records older than 1800, missing depth, and non-species-level identifications.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

Aggregated from OBIS, GBIF, Cornils et al. (2018), and MAREDAT.

Collection Method

Data retrieved via R packages (RPostgreSQL, robis, rgbif) in April 2018, followed by quality filtering and integration.

Time Range

Records collected up to April 2018, with a filter excluding data older than 1800.

Geography

Global marine coverage.