OBIS
Science & Mathapi.obis.org
The Ocean Biodiversity Information System, IOC-UNESCO's global marine biodiversity database: 229 million occurrence records, taxon records keyed to WoRMS AphiaIDs, regional species checklists, dataset metadata and marine area definitions.
The crw MCP on your computer calls OBIS directly. Calls cost no credits and the data does not pass through fastCRW. Install it once for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, Gemini CLI or OpenCode, with your fastCRW API key in place of the placeholder:
Capabilities (7)
obis/areasFree, runs locallyReturns OBIS area definitions - EEZs, Large Marine Ecosystems, Ecologically or Biologically Significant Areas and similar - with area id, name and type.
obis/checklistFree, runs locallyReturns the accepted taxa recorded below a taxon in OBIS, with scientific name, authorship, rank, status, AphiaID and the accepted name for synonyms.
obis/datasetFree, runs locallyReturns the metadata for a single OBIS dataset by UUID, including title, abstract, citation, source and archive URLs, contacts, licence and record count.
obis/datasetsFree, runs locallyReturns OBIS dataset metadata: UUID, source URL and archive, core type, an extraction timestamp and the number of records each dataset contributes.
obis/occurrencesFree, runs locallyReturns marine occurrence records for a taxon: coordinates, depth, date, basis of record, dataset name, recorded and identified names, and the quality-control flags OBIS attaches to each record.
obis/statisticsFree, runs locallyReturns the database's headline counts: occurrence records, accepted species, taxa, datasets, species-level records and the year range covered.
obis/taxonFree, runs locallyReturns the taxonomic record for one AphiaID: scientific name, rank, status, accepted name and id, parent, kingdom and phylum, and marine, brackish, freshwater and terrestrial flags.
Licence
It is also necessary that all data provided is clearly linked to a usage license, respecting the licenses currently accepted by OBIS (i.e. CC0, CC BY, CC BY-NC), ensuring that users are able to fully understand how they can reuse the data and also to give the correct acknowledgement to data providers where required.
https://manual.obis.org/policy.htmlAttribution
Display this wherever you show the data. It arrives on every response as provenance.attributionText.
OBIS (2026) Ocean Biodiversity Information System. Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO. www.obis.org. Individual datasets retain their own licences and citation requirements.