Aquatic Environment and Biodiversity Annual Review 2012

AEBAR 2012: Marine Biodiversity
Figure 11.1: Potential biological impacts of climate change on Australian marine life. The ratings in this table are
based on the expected responses to predicted changes in Sea Surface Temperature (SST), salinity, wind, pH, mixed
layer depth and sea level, and from literature reviews for each species group. The implicit assumption underlying this
table is that Australian marine species will respond in similar ways to their counterparts throughout the world
(Hobday et al. 2006.) Note: phenology means life cycle.
The Census increased the total number of known marine species by about 20,000, from 230,000 in
2000 to about 250,000 in 2010. Among the millions of specimens collected in both familiar and
seldom-explored waters, the Census found more than 6,000 potentially new species and completed
formal descriptions of more than 1,200 of them. It also found that some species considered to be rare
are more common than previously thought (Ausubel et al. 2010). The digital archive (the Ocean
Biogeographic Information System OBIS (http://www.iobis.org/) has now grown to 31 million
observations, and the Census compiled the first regional and global comparisons of marine species
diversity. It helped to create the first comprehensive list of the known marine species, and also helped
to compose web pages for more than 80,000 species in the Encyclopaedia of Life 37 .
Applying genetic analysis on an unprecedented scale to a dataset of 35,000 species from widely
differing major groupings of marine life, the Census graphed the proximity and distance of relations
37 www.eol.org/
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