Query marine species occurrence (including eDNA-derived) records for a region using the OBIS API
domain: obis.org · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Use the OBIS API (documented at obis.org/data/access and manual.obis.org/access.html) to search occurrence records by taxon, geographic bounding box, and date range.
For eDNA-specific records, filter using the DNADerivedData extension to isolate occurrences generated from environmental DNA sampling rather than direct observation/capture.
For quick exploratory pulls, query the API directly (noting it returns only a small first page of results by default) or use the OBIS Mapper for visual exploration.
For larger programmatic analysis, use the robis R package, which wraps the same API, or download the bulk GeoParquet dataset hosted on AWS for very large subsets.
Note that absence/dropped records are excluded from default downloads — request them explicitly via the API or robis package if the analysis needs non-detections.
Known gotchas
The plain API is not suited to bulk retrieval given small default page sizes — for full-region or full-taxon pulls, use robis or the AWS GeoParquet dataset instead of paging the raw API.
OBIS aggregates data from 30+ independently-operated regional/thematic nodes, so data quality, taxonomic resolution, and update frequency vary by contributing dataset/node.
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