Mesophotic.org: a repository for scientific information on mesophotic ecosystems

• DOI: 10.1093/database/baz140
• Publication Date: 2019-11-18T23:33:37Z
• Authors: Pim Bongaerts; Gonzalo Perez-Ros...; Veronica Z Radice; Gal Eyal; Andrea Gori; Erika Gress; Nicholas M Hammerman; Alejandra Hernand...; Jack Laverick; Paul Muir; Hudson Pinheiro; Richard L Pyle; Luiz Rocha; Joseph A Turner; Ryan Booker
• Keywords: 0301 basic medicine; 020; 0303 health sciences; 1300 Biochemistry; Databases, Factual; Geography; Publications; Genetics and Molecular Biology; 15. Life on land; 1710 Information Systems; 1100 Agricultural and Biological Sciences; 03 medical and health sciences; 13. Climate action; General Biochemistry; Original Article; 14. Life underwater; General Agricultural and Biological Sciences; Ecosystem; Information Systems

Abstract Mesophotic coral ecosystems (MCEs) and temperate mesophotic (TMEs) occur at depths of roughly 30–150 m depth are characterized by the presence photosynthetic organisms despite reduced light availability. Exploration these dates back several decades, but our knowledge remained extremely limited until about a decade ago, when renewed interest resulted in establishment rapidly growing research community. Here, we present ‘mesophotic.org’ database, comprehensive curated repository scientific literature on ecosystems. Through both manually automatically extracted metadata, facilitates rapid retrieval available information particular topics (e.g. taxa or geographic regions), exploration spatial/temporal trends identification gaps. The can be queried to comprehensively obtain data address large-scale questions guide future directions. Overall, provides an independent open-source platform for ever-growing community working MCEs TMEs collate expedite understanding occurrence, composition functioning Database URL: http://mesophotic.org/