🌊 OBIS Ocean Biodiversity Information System Scraper

🚀 Export marine species occurrences in seconds. Pull observations, taxonomic checklists, statistics, and dataset metadata from the Ocean Biodiversity Information System by scientific name, taxon, geometry (WKT polygon), date range, or depth. No sign-up needed.

The OBIS Scraper pulls from the official Ocean Biodiversity Information System catalogue, the world's largest open repository of marine species occurrence data. Each record carries up to 50 structured fields, including the scientific name with authorship, WoRMS AphiaID, full taxonomic hierarchy (kingdom through species), event date, basis of record, decimal latitude and longitude, depth, sea-surface temperature, salinity, locality, dataset provenance, and quality-control flags.

Coverage spans 200,000+ marine species observed across every ocean, coastline, and inland sea on Earth, with records contributed by 30+ regional OBIS nodes and thousands of source datasets reaching back to the 19th century. Choose between four modes (occurrence records, taxonomic checklist, statistics summary, dataset index), filter by scientific name, AphiaID, OBIS node, geometry, depth, or date, and download as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML in under three minutes.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Marine biologists, conservation NGOs, government fisheries agencies, environmental consultants, oceanographers, climate researchers, GIS analysts, citizen-science platforms	Species range mapping, climate-shift analysis, MPA design, fisheries stock research, biodiversity hotspot identification, environmental impact assessments

📋 What the OBIS Scraper does

Four modes combine with up to nine filters in a single run:

• 🐠 Occurrence mode. One row per species observation with full taxonomy, geography, depth, oceanographic context, and provenance.
• 📋 Checklist mode. One row per taxon with record counts, environment flags (marine, brackish, freshwater, terrestrial), and category.
• 📊 Statistics mode. Aggregated summary counts for the matching filter.
• 📚 Dataset mode. Index of contributing OBIS datasets with title, citation, abstract, intellectual rights, record counts, spatial extent, and contributing institutes.

Filters available across modes: scientific name, taxon ID (WoRMS AphiaID), OBIS node UUID, QC flags, start/end dates, WKT geometry polygon, depth min/max. Switch on compact mode to drop low-value fields for slimmer rows.

💡 Why it matters: marine biodiversity data underpins MPA design, climate-driven range-shift modelling, and fisheries management. Building your own pipeline means dealing with paged result sets, taxonomy joins, and dataset citation tracking. This Actor handles it all on every run.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: absence, aphiaID, basisOfRecord, bathymetry, brackish, class, collectionCode, coordinateUncertaintyInMeters, country, dataset_id, date_year, decimalLatitude, decimalLongitude, depth, dropped, eventDate, family, flags, genus, id, institutionCode, kingdom, locality, marine, maximumDepthInMeters, minimumDepthInMeters, node_id, occurrenceID, occurrenceStatus, order, phylum, recordedBy, scientificName, scientificNameAuthorship, scientificNameID, scientificNameWithAuthor, scrapedAt, shoredistance, species, sss. All 40 field names come from a real production run, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the OBIS Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Pick a mode, supply a scientific name or AphiaID, optionally add a WKT polygon and date range.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your biodiversity data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from sign-up to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

🔗 Recommended Actors

• 🌳 GBIF Biodiversity Scraper - Global biodiversity occurrences (land + ocean)
• 🦅 iNaturalist Scraper - Citizen-science species observations
• 🌊 NOAA Weather Scraper - U.S. and global weather and ocean data
• 🏞️ ProtectedPlanet WDPA Scraper - World Database on Protected Areas
• 🐟 FishBase Scraper - Global fish species reference

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more reference-data scrapers.

⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by OBIS, IOC-UNESCO, or any of its contributing nodes. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available open biodiversity data is collected.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

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