IndOBIS collects data sets of occurrences of identifiable marine species at a specific time and place collected mainly in the Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. It is one of the more than 20 regional nodes of the Ocean Biodiversity Information System OBIS.

IndOBIS supplies the global scientific community with various types of geo referenced information on the biodiversity of Indian Ocean. CMLRE, as the Nodal agency, integrate and collate information from sources that lie scattered among several agencies, institutions and individuals within the Indian Ocean region. The near shallow waters of coastal belt (from intertidal to 30 m depths) of the Indian EEZ, which cannot be surveyed using FORV Sagar Sampada, is being studied with the active participation of several maritime universities and institutions. Beyond the 30 m depth zone, data will be gathered through FORV Sagar Sampada cruises by CMLRE. IndOBIS thus contains species occurrence data on habitat level as data bases which include inter alia variety of spatial querying tools for visualizing relationship among species and their environment.

1,10,199 occurrence records of marine organisms reported from Indian Ocean archived and hosted at www.iobis.org

1096 voucher specimens of rare deep-sea organisms collected onboard FORV Sagar Sampada maintained at FORV Referral Centre

All samples are assigned a unique voucher id and a database has been created for the same

New records of unique deep-sea organisms such as gigantic sea spiders (Ascorhynchus levissimus), enigmatic sea pens (Gyrophyllum hirondellei), echinoderms such as stalked crinoids (Saracrinus angulatus) and holothurians (Protankyra conferta), mushroom soft corals (Anthomastus sp.) etc have been reported/redescribed from the Indian EEZ