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SCAR was created 50 years ago to continue the international coordination that had begun in Antarctic scientific research under the aegis of the International Geophysical Year (IGY 1957-58).
Among SCAR's successes in the biological arena are:
- determining the functional ecosystem processes of the Southern Ocean ecosystem;
- documenting the distribution, abundance and long-term trends in Antarctic and Subantarctic seabird and seal populations;
- understanding the diversity, ecology and population dynamics of the organisms beneath the Antarctic sea ice, and their sensitivity to change;
- exploring the biodiversity and ecology of the Antarctic abyssal life;
- establishing how Antarctic land, lake and pond life respond to climate change; and
- providing the scientific basis for the formation of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Living Marine Resources (CCAMLR).
SCAR's biological programmes are managed by its Standing Scientific Committee on the Life Sciences. Under that banner, its major current biological research programme is Evolution and Biodiversity in the Antarctic (EBA), which aims at "describing the past, understanding the present, predicting the future". Its main component is the Census of Antarctic Marine Life (CAML), which is the Southern Ocean component of the global Census of Marine Life (CoML) The EBA database also holds records on alien species, and work is in progress on identifying terrestrial bioregions and creating species profiles for flora within the Windmill Islands area. In addition, SCAR has Action Groups responsible for continuous plankton recorder data, and for the biological response to Antarctic fuel spills. There are also Expert groups dealing with birds and with seals.
The SCAR Marine Biodiversity Information Network (SCAR-MarBIN), funded by the Belgian Science Policy, is CAML's sister project, and was initiated to compile and manage existing and new information on Antarctic marine biodiversity by establishing and supporting a distributed system of interoperable databases. SCAR-MarBIN provides data to the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) (and now GBIF) and acts as the Regional OBIS Node for the Antarctic.
As core initiatives of the International Polar Year International Polar Year (IPY 2007-2008), both CAML and SCAR-MarBIN will leave a highly valuable legacy for future generations in the form of a powerful information tool that will provide a baseline reference for predicting the future of the marine communities around Antarctica, which are currently challenged by global change.
Terrestrial and limnetic biological data from all regions within th Antarctic and sub-Antarctic are collated from the EBA community and
stored in the EBA Antarctic Biodiversity Database at the Australian
Antarctic Data Center (AADC) in Hobart, along with marine data from the Australian Antarctic Program, which has been shared via GBIF since the data portal was established in 2003.
Once approval has been given by the data custodian for public release along with relevant metadata records at the Global Change Master Directory (GCMD), the data are then made available to GBIF. The Antarctic marine biodiversity data of SCAR will be provided through SCAR-MarBIN and its Antarctic terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity through the AADC.
The new SCAR-MarBIN data will increase the number of data records available via the GBIF portal by a approximately 212,000 records; these data will be shared by 26 providers. Another 26 providers to SCAR-MarBIN are already providers to GBIF. Altogether, the 52 SCAR-MarBIN providers are sharing a total of 497,928 records collected from 190,256 distinct geographical points and representing 2,522 species.
Both SCAR-MarBIN and AADC, as well as many other institutions, have been collaborating very closely to make access to biodiversity data (both taxonomic and distribution data) much easier. They have also been developing other services and tools, which are ready to be shared with the GBIF community.
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