mesophotic.org

mesophotic.org curates a validated literature repository and associated metadata on mesophotic coral ecosystems (MCEs) and temperate mesophotic ecosystems (TMEs) spanning approximately 30 to 150 meters to support research on their occurrence, composition, and functioning.

Key Features:

• Comprehensive Literature Repository: Houses 689 scientifically validated articles that present original data from mesophotic depths.
• Curated Metadata: Metadata are extracted both manually and automatically to capture taxonomic, geographic, and study-specific information.
• Research Facilitation Tools: Enables querying to explore spatial and temporal trends, identify knowledge gaps, and assemble datasets for large-scale scientific questions.
• Guidance for Future Research: Centralizes evidence to support the identification of research directions on occurrence, composition, and functioning of MCEs and TMEs.

Scientific Applications:

• Baseline synthesis of mesophotic research: Aggregates validated publications and metadata for synthesis of knowledge on MCEs and TMEs.
• Spatial and temporal trend analysis: Supports analyses of geographic and temporal patterns in mesophotic studies.
• Knowledge-gap identification: Facilitates detection of under-studied taxa, regions, and research questions.
• Support for large-scale ecological questions: Provides compiled data and metadata for addressing broad-scale hypotheses about mesophotic ecosystems.

Methodology:

Metadata are extracted both manually and automatically from the curated literature collection.