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 (CAML) 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, SCAR-MarBIN), a new initiative, the multi-authored "Biogeographic Atlas of the Southern Ocean", has been established. Under the aegis of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), the aim of the Atlas is to provide an up-to-date synthesis of Antarctic and sub-Antarctic biogeographic knowledge and to make available a new comprehensive online resource for visualization, analysis and modeling of species distribution. It will constitute a major scientific output of CAML and SCAR-MarBIN, as well as being a significant legacy of CoML and the International Polar Year to fulfill the needs of biogeographic information for science, conservation, monitoring and sustainable management of the changing Southern Ocean. It will be of direct benefit to the Antarctic Treaty and associated bodies such as the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. Developed by: Census of Antarctic Marine Life (CAML) and the OBIS Antarctic Node (the SCAR Marine Biodiversity Information Network, SCAR-MarBIN).

The Ocean Biodiversity information System (OBIS) aims to absorb, integrate, and assess isolated datasets into a larger, more comprehensive picture of life in our oceans. The system is expected to stimulate research about our oceans to generate new hypotheses concerning evolutionary processes, species distributions, and roles of organisms in marine systems on a global scale. OBIS provides a portal or gateway to many datasets containing information on where and when marine species have been recorded. The datasets are integrated so you can search them all seamlessly by species name, higher taxonomic level, geographic area, depth, and time; and then map and find environmental data related to the locations. With the evolving OBIS database repository, users can identify biodiversity hotspots and large-scale ecological patterns, analyze dispersions of species over time and space, and plot species' locations with temperature, salinity and depth. Created by the Census of Marine Life (CoML), OBIS is now part of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO, under its International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE) Programme. The following web service technologies are provided for retrieval of OBIS biogeographic distribution records: REST Services, DiGIR, OAI Services and OGC Services.