The Ocean Barcode Atlas: a web service to explore the biodiversity and
biogeography of marine organisms.
Abstract
The Ocean Barcode Atlas (OBA) is a user friendly web service designed
for biologists who wish to explore the biodiversity and biogeography of
marine organisms locked in otherwise difficult to mine planetary scale
DNA metabarcode datasets. Using just a web browser, a comprehensive
picture of the diversity of a taxon or a barcode sequence is visualized
graphically on world maps and interactive charts. Interactive results
panels allow dynamic threshold adjustments and the display of diversity
results in their environmental context measured at the time of sampling
(temperature, oxygen, latitude, etc.). Ecological analyses such as alpha
and beta-diversity plots are produced via publication quality vector
graphics representations. Currently, the Ocean Barcode Altas is deployed
online with the i) Tara Oceans eukaryotic 18S-V9 rDNA metabarcodes, ii)
Tara Oceans 16S/18S rRNA miTags, and iii) 16S-V4V5 metabarcodes
collected during the Malaspina-2010 expedition. Additional prokaryotic
or eukaryotic plankton barcode datasets will be added upon availability,
given they provide the required complement of barcodes (including raw
reads to compute barcode abundance) associated with their contextual
environmental variables. Ocean Barcode Atlas is a freely-available web
service at: http://oba.mio.osupytheas.fr/ocean-atlas/.