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The Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) at University Bremen (UniHB),
in collaboration with the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI),
operates PANGAEA®, the Publishing Network for Geoscientific and Environmental Data
(www.PANGAEA.de) as a permanent facility, partnering in over 50 research projects
at national (Germany), European and international levels. PANGAEA® aims at collecting,
scrutinising, and disseminating geo-referenced data about natural and anthropogenic
components and functions in ecosystems at scales ranging from individual organisms,
mesoscale features (e.g. upwelling, eddies, seamounts, coral reefs), and oceanic basin
to global planetary scales. Core services supplied by PANGAEA® are scientific data
management, long-term data archiving, data publication, and data dissemination via
visualisation and analysis software and via interoperability with other European and
international data dissemination systems. Data management includes quality control
of metadata and the development of ontologies and vocabularies according to international
protocols and standards. PANGAEA® has further defined work flows and technologies
to allow automatic ingestion of data from marine observatories based on OGC standards
( (SWE - Sensor Web Enablement). Metadata are extensive and each dataset is citable
and accessible by Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Datasets published by PANGAEA®
are extremely diverse and include for example water column profiles, sediment core
profiles, biogeographic distributions, meteorological and oceanographic time series,
vital rate measurements on individual organisms or communities, sea bed photographs,
audio and video records, and ROV surveys. PANGAEA® integrates biological data on plankton
(including viruses, bacteria, autotrophic and heterotophic protists, crustaceans and
jellyfish), fish, corals, micro-, meio- and macrobenthos, marine mammals and birds.
In addition to contemporary observations we offer an extensive paleobiogeographic
record from marine sediment cores. Biological data include key biodiversity parameters
such as taxon-specific abundance and biomass, and also an extensive range of parameters
describing the life history and vital rates of marine life. PANGAEA® is accredited
as a World Data Centre by the International Council for Sciences (ICSU) World Data
System (WDS) and accredited as World Radiation Monitoring Centre (WRMC) by the World
Meteorological Organisation (WMO) as part of their WMO Information System. At present
PANGAEA® holds metadata and data for more than 300.000 datasets comprising more than
6 billion data items for more than 80.000 different measurement types (parameters),
more than 17.000 principal investigators (authors), and around 20.000 references to
journal articles. The system is operated in the sense of the Berlin Declaration on
Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities which is a follow up to the
Budapest Open Access Initiative. Some ongoing projects are under moratorium so that
access to data may be restricted, but metadata is always freely accessible.
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