Abstract:
The World Ocean Database 2001 (WOD01) is an eight CD-ROM product containing
over seven million oceanographic stations. Only one disk (WOD01 disk #1)
contains plankton tows, which are co-located with two million other Ocean
Station Data (OSD) profiles. These two million profiles are then divided into
648 separate "WMO" files, each one representing a single 10x10-degree
... latitude-longitude WMO grid box of the world. While this layout was necessary
and efficient for the 6.9 million non-plankton records, it makes extracting and
accessing the plankton data very difficult.
Additionally, the World Ocean Atlas 2001 - Volume 5: Plankton contains maps of
the distribution of World Ocean Database 2001 plankton taxonomic groups and
one-degree latitude-longitude fields of mean zooplankton biomass. Maps for
all-data annual and seasonal compositing periods are presented for
bacterioplankton, phytoplankton, protist plankton, zooplankton, and plankton
biomass. All-data annual maps are also presented for select taxonomic
sub-groups within these major categories (e.g., diatoms, copepods,
chaetognaths). One-degree latitude-longitude mean fields of annual zooplankton
biomass and annual and seasonal zooplankton carbon mass are also provided.
OBIS serves 1,281,125 of these plankton records. 
