Abstract
The Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) has developed an international portal site that allows users to access and use marine species occurrence information online, through a web browser. A mirror site in Japan for the international OBIS portal is available at the National Institute for Environmental Studies. The mirror site includes over 11,000,000 records and 70,000 species from 163 distributed databases (as of December 2006). The coverage of records along the coast of Japan is limited to invasive marine species, although large numbers of species occurrence records from around Japan have already been registered in OBIS, in other parts of the world. The geo-referenced species occurrence and time line information in the OBIS database is considered to be a complementary tool, to be used with the Global Invasive Species Database (GISD) beta version, for analyzing the historical invasion and habitat extension of known alien species. The occurrence information for 29 marine species that have been identified as invasive alien species in the GISD can be retrieved from OBIS. The mapping of these records along a time line revealed the history of invasion of Carcinus maenus, from the Atlantic to the southern Pacific Ocean. However, the occurrence of Carcinus maenus and other known alien species, such as Ciona intestinalis and Molgula manhattensis, around Japan cannot be confirmed with OBIS data, although these species have reportedly invaded Tokyo Bay and Osaka Bay. To close the information gap, it is necessary to obtain information from marine ecosystem monitoring projects from around Japan; this will help to increase public awareness of marine invasive species around Japan and faciliate further analysis of the interaction between environmental change and species distribution.
