OBIS-SEAMAP has made significant updates on Nov 19th, 2013

We have been making tremendous effort to improve the database quality and online mapping and visualization tools. Now we are pleased to announce that these improvements and updates are released on November 19th, 2013. Some highlights of the improvements and updates are:

• More comprehensive integration of multiple data types, especially passive acoustic monitoring data. For example, diel plots initially developed for PAM data are now available for other data types. Different data types are mapped with distinct symbols.
• You have been able to extract data within biogeographic (e.g. Large Marine Ecosystem) or jurisdictional (e.g. EEZ) regions. Now you can extract data beyond these regions. For example, you can map marine mammal sighting data in the open oceans (beyond EEZs).
• On-the-fly calculations of biodiversity indices including Shannon, Simpson and Hurbert's. Biodiversity indices are visualized on both map and charts.
• Three temporal criteria, a time range, months of a year and hours of a day, can be combined. For example, you can find sighting data recorded in summer months (June, July, August) in years from 2000 through 2010. You can further add hours of interest (e.g. day times).
• Charts now have an option to separate series by species. This feature allows you to compare time series of occurrence of multiple species. 
• When filtering the data by taxon at a higher rank (e.g. Order or family), you can specify which ranks below the taxon of your interest are to be included. For example, if you are interested in the genus level of baleen whales (Mysticeti), you select Mysticeti and specify the genus rank to be included (order, family and species to be excluded). You don't need to select all the Mysticeti genus taxa one by one.
• The version of Google Maps (Javascript API) that the OBIS-SEAMAP mapping interface uses is updated to version 3 from version 2.
• The Google Maps version 3 provides a drawing functionality for circles, which is now integrated into the drawing tool of the OBIS-SEAMAP mapping interface.

We expect you can enjoy these improvements!