EurOBIS, the European Ocean Biodiversity Information System hosted at VLIZ and the shared data backbone of EMODnet Biology, completed its August 2026 data harvest. The cycle brought together 32 datasets from data providers across Europe: 23 newly added and 9 updated with new or corrected records. Together, they added more than 722,000 marine species occurrence records to the database, of which around 455,000 come from the newly added datasets alone.
The harvested datasets cover a wide range of topics and regions, including long-term subtidal macroalgae monitoring in the Azores, Mediterranean fish diet studies, offshore wind farm biodiversity monitoring, and environmental DNA (eDNA) surveys from the MedOBIS network. As with every EurOBIS harvest, all incoming data passed through quality control and standardisation using the Darwin Core standard before publication, ensuring that the records are directly usable and comparable across datasets.
Following the harvest, the team is now working through the usual follow-up steps: registering datasets with GBIF and enabling OBIS as a network where needed, so that as many of the newly harvested datasets as possible also flow into these global infrastructures. The updated occurrence, measurement-or-fact and eDNA data have also been refreshed on the EDITO Data Lab, making them explorable through the EDITO Digital Twin Ocean platform.
This harvest is part of the regular monthly cycle through which EurOBIS continues to grow as a shared, quality-controlled resource for marine biodiversity data in European waters, feeding both EMODnet Biology's own products and the global OBIS and GBIF networks.
More information can be found through this link.