Perry

ChEss (www.noc.soton.ac.uk/chess) is one of the 14 field projects of the Census of Marine Life (www.coml.org) concerned with the biogeography of deep-water chemosynthetic habitats. One of our main outputs is ChEssBase, a dynamic relational database available online since December 2004. The aim of ChEssBase is to provide taxonomical, biological, ecological and distributional data of all species described from deep-water chemosynthetic ecosystems, as well as a bibliography and information on the habitats. These habitats include hydrothermal vents, cold seeps, whale falls, sunken wood and areas of minimum oxygen that intersect with the continental margin or seamounts.