Groman

The Census of Marine Zooplankton (CMarZ, see www.cmarz.org) is a field project of the Census of Marine Life (see www.CoML.org). CMarZ is working toward a taxonomically comprehensive assessment of biodiversity of animal plankton throughout the world's oceans. The project goal is to produce accurate and complete information on zooplankton species diversity, biomass, biogeographical distribution, genetic diversity, and community structure by 2010. The taxonomic focus is on the animals that drift with ocean currents throughout their lives (holozooplankton). To support the data management and web-serving requirements of this project we have developed a MySQL database and an approach to produce automatically updated species pages derived from this database. Since contributions to the database are from a geographically dispersed set of taxonomic experts and para-taxonomists world-wide, we have also developed web-based data entry which enables registered contributors to add and maintain the database information. Visitors to the web site may search our database to retrieve information on a variety of zooplankton species. The CMarZ database includes dynamic summary presentations of taxonomic, morphological, ecological, biogeographical, and molecular information for selected zooplankton species. Future plans call for adding a MapServer interface to the database. In addition to providing a geospatial interface to the data, MapServer will also provide Open Geospatial Consortium, standards-based interoperability to the database by supporting the Web Mapping Service and Web Feature Service protocols.