The Biodiversity of Ice-free Antarctica Database

Full description

Antarctica is one of Earth’s most untouched, inhospitable, and poorly-known regions. Although knowledge of its biodiversity has increased over recent decades, a diverse, wide-ranging and spatially explicit compilation of the biodiversity that inhabits Antarctica’s permanently ice-free areas is unavailable. This absence hinders both Antarctic biodiversity research and the integration of Antarctica in global biodiversity-related studies. Fundamental and applied research on biodiversity patterns, ecological structure and function, and options for conservation are reliant on spatially-resolved, taxonomically-consistent observations. Such information is especially important for modern, data-driven biodiversity science, both in Antarctica and globally, and forms the backbone of biodiversity informatics, reflected for example in the Darwin Core Standard used by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Biodiversity data are also essential to fulfil the conservation requirements for Antarctica, as set out in the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty and inform the design of systematic surveys to address biodiversity and ecological knowledge gaps, for both specific taxa and ecosystems. Such surveys are key requirements for understanding and mitigating the impacts of environmental change on the region’s biodiversity. Here, we address these requirements through the public release of The Biodiversity of Ice-free Antarctica Database. In 2008, we extracted a subset of biodiversity records only from terrestrial ice-free areas, from the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) Antarctic Biodiversity Database. We have subsequently added thousands of records from a range of sources; checking, and where necessary (and possible), correcting the spatial location, clarifying, cross-referencing and harmonizing taxonomy with globally-recognized sources, and documenting the original source of records. The Biodiversity of Ice-free Antarctica Database spans the early 1800s to 2019 (with most records collected after 1950) and represents the most comprehensive consolidation of Antarctic ice-free biodiversity occurrence data yet compiled into a single database. The Biodiversity of Ice-free Antarctica Database contains 35,654 records of 1,890 species in over 800 genera across six kingdoms and spans all Antarctic Conservation Biogeographic Regions.

Detailed metadata can be found in the Supplementary Materials of:

Terauds, A., Lee, J.R., Wauchope, H., Raymond, B., Bergstrom, D.M., Convey, P., Mason, C., Patterson, C.R., Robinson, S.A, Van de Putte, A., Watts, D. and Chown, S.L. (2025) The Biodiversity of Ice-free Antarctica Database. Ecology.

Lineage

Progress Code: completed

Statement: Spatial data ranges in quality - where available, this has been documented. Taxonomic resolution and quality also varies, but has been checked as far as possible. The dates provided in temporal coverage are approximate only and represent the beginning and end dates of AAS project 4296.

Notes

Purpose
To provide a comprehensive database of known terrestrial biodiversity records in ice-free areas of the Antarctic continent.