CalCOFI Fish Larvae & Egg Tows published to OBIS and GBIF!!

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Mathew Biddle - NOAA Federal

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Mar 13, 2026, 1:54:46 PM (6 days ago) Mar 13

to ioos...@googlegroups.com, _NOS US MBON, Ben Best, esatter...@ucsd.edu, Ana Lara-Lopez, st...@thedatapatch.com, w.app...@unesco.org, p.pro...@unesco.org, e.law...@obis.org, Laura Brenskelle - NOAA Affiliate, Mathew Biddle - NOAA Federal

Hi MBON Colleagues and IOOS community,

A new dataset of interest has been published to the Ocean Biodiversity Information System USA (OBIS-USA) Node’s Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) from the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) project!

In collaboration with the Global Ocean Observing System BioEco Panel, Ben Best (Ocean Metrics, formerly EcoQuants) and Erin Satterthwaite (UCSD) published the CalCOFI Fish Larvae & Egg Tows dataset to OBIS and GBIF in early March. These data consist of fish larvae counts and standardized counts from 1951 to 2023 for eggs captured in CalCOFI ichthyoplankton nets (primarily vertical [Calvet or Pairovet], oblique [bongo or ring nets], and surface tows [Manta nets]) in the Pacific Ocean. These data consist of 463,655 occurrence records, for 539 species and contributes to GOOS Fish Abundance and Distribution Essential Ocean Variable (EOV). The reproducible notebook for generating this DarwinCore archive can be found at calcofi.io/workflows/publish_ichthyo_to_obis.html. Let’s congratulate Ben and Erin on the wonderful contribution of data to the global system!

As a reminder, the OBIS-USA IPT is archived at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information on a quarterly basis. You can find the archive package at this url: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/archive/accession/0250940

If you have questions about the process to standardize your data to Darwin Core, feel free to join the Standardizing Marine Biological Data Working Group to learn more about the Darwin Core standardization process.

If you need access to the OBIS-USA IPT so you can publish your own datasets, please reach out to Mathew Biddle and Laura Brenskelle (cc’d here).