Southern Ocean Biogeographic Atlas to be Published

The book is to be launched shortly by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) at its Open Science Conference in Auckland, New Zealand.

Background
The publisher's web portal explains that the Southern Ocean waters to the west of the Antarctic Peninsula are warming faster than almost any other place on Earth. This area of most rapid environmental change was among others targeted by the Census of Antarctic Marine Life in its collection of biogeographic information.

Such biogeographic information is of fundamental importance for monitoring biodiversity, discovering biodiversity hotspots, defining ecoregions and detecting the impacts of environmental changes. It is the preliminary and necessary step in designing marine protected areas in a changing ocean.

At the end of five years of extensive biodiversity exploration and assessment by CAML and the OBIS Antarctic Node (the SCAR Marine Biodiversity Information Network, a new initiative, the multi-authored "CAML Biogeographic Atlas of the Southern Ocean", has been established under the aegis of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) to provide an up-to-date synthesis of Antarctic and sub-Antarctic biogeographic knowledge and to make available a new comprehensive online resource for visualisation, analysis and modelling of species distribution.

Objectives
To establish - on the basis of an unprecedented amount, diversity and quality of biogeographic and environmental data - a new synthesis of the biogeography of the Southern Ocean (patterns and processes), covering benthos, zooplankton, nekton, birds and seals, to provide a benchmark of biogeographic knowledge at the end of CAML, and to help define the present biogeochemical and biogeographic provinces and to predict future changes under various climate change scenarios.


More than 9,000 species, from single-cell organisms to penguins and whales, are chronicled in the first Antarctic atlas since 1969.

More information about the book is at: http://atlas.biodiversity.aq/