IMIS

These habitats include hydrothermal vents, cold seeps, whale falls, sunken wood and areas of minimum oxygen that intersect with the continental margin or seamounts. Since the discovery of hydrothermal vents in 1977 and of cold seep communities in 1984, over 590 species from vents and over 230 species from seeps have been described. Chemosynthetically fueled communities have now also been found on large organic falls to the deep-sea floor such as whale falls and sunken wood, as well as on benthic zones of oxygen minimum.

The data gathered in the last 30 years has shown that some species are shared amongst these ecosystems and our knowledge of their phylogeography improves with every new discovery. New species are continuously being discovered and described from research programmes around the globe and therefore ChEssBase is in active development and new data are being entered regularly. At present, ChEssBase includes data on 1740 species from 193 chemosynthetic sites around the globe. These data contain information (when available) on the taxonomy, morphology, trophic level, reproduction, endemicity, habitat type and distribution. There are now 1880 papers in our reference database.

The first version of ChEssBase was available online in December 2004. In summer 2005, ChEssBase and the InterRidge biological database (www.interridge.org) were fused into a single source of information for biological data from chemosynthetic ecosystems. This second version of ChEssBase is available online since August 2005, with new records as well as new search and download options. Since December 2005, ChEssBase is integrated in the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS, www.iobis.org).

ChEssBase is supported by a species-based relational database in MySQL. The database includes 3 major components:

1. Taxonomy (from kingdom to subspecies)
2. Distribution (from site to major geographic area)
3. Samples (including sample, cruise and institution information)

ChEssBase is regularly updated with new information available in the literature. In order to quickly obtain accurate new data and help maintain the database up to date, we would be very grateful if you could send us any new publications with data relevant to ChEssBase, which we would add to the database, together with the relevant references.