The Register of Antarctic Marine Species (RAMS): a ten-year appraisal

By

Jossart, Quentin
Moreau, Camille
Aguera, Antonio
Broyer, Claude de
Danis, Bruno

Type

Article

Date of Publication

2015

Original Publication

ZooKeys

Volume

524

Pages

137-145

Subjects

Antarctic , Asteroidea , Bibliometrics , Biodiversity , Register of Antarctic Marine Species , Southern Ocean

Contributed by

Pensoft Publishers

Language

English

Published by

Sofia, Bulgaria Pensoft Publishers

Identifiers

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.524.6091

 

Abstract

The Register of Antarctic Marine Species (RAMS) is a marine species database that manages an authoritative taxonomic list of species occurring in the Southern Ocean. RAMS links with several other initiatives managing biogeographic or genomics information. The current paper aims to briefly present RAMS and provides an updated snapshot of its contents, in the form of a DarwinCore checklist (available through http://ipt.biodiversity.aq/resource.do?r=rams) and illustrative barplots. Moreover, this article presents a ten year appraisal (since the creation of RAMS). This appraisal first focuses on RAMS bibliometrics. We observed that RAMS was cited (Google Scholar) in 50 distinct publications among which 32 were peer-reviewed in 18 different journals. Three journals (Antarctic Science, Polar Biology, ZooKeys) represent almost 40% of these peer-review publications. The second appraisal focuses on the evolution of new RAMS records. We observed an important decrease in data additions since 2011. As a case study, we focused on an original dataset for a specific group (Asteroidea, Echinodermata). It appears that around one hundred species of asteroids are lacking in RAMS despite the relatively high availability of these data. This suggests that the users’ community (or collaborative projects such as AquaRES) could be helpful in order to maintain the RAMS database over the long term.