Over 650,000 marine wildlife records spanning 12 years are now freely accessible online — marking what the Marine Institute calls “a landmark moment” for open science and open environmental data in Ireland.
To mark Biodiversity Week 2026, which continues to this Sunday 24 May, the institute has made its Water Framework Directive (WFD) benthic invertebrate dataset publicly available for the first time, opening more than a decade of seabed survey data to researchers, planners, policymakers and the public across Ireland and beyond.
The dataset, which covers the period from 2012 to 2024, contains records of 650,304 individual organisms from 2,529 distinct species, collected across 4,415 sampling events in coastal waterbodies around Ireland. It will be updated annually going forward.
“Protecting biodiversity starts with understanding it. Making this data openly available is therefore an important step in ensuring that Ireland’s marine environment is monitored, understood, and protected for generations to come,” said Louise Healy, scientific and technical officer in benthic ecology.
“It is a wonderful and fitting way to mark Biodiversity Week, by sharing our work and existing data on the biodiversity of our seas.”
Benthic communities are animals living in and on the seabed, including molluscs, crustaceans, algae and microorganisms. These organisms underpin the health of coastal ecosystems, driving nutrient cycling, supporting marine food webs, and stabilising the seabed.
The Marine Institute monitors benthic communities in Ireland’s coastal waterbodies every two years, recording which species are present and in what abundance.
This data underpins Ireland’s monitoring and reporting obligations under the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) and Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) and supports effective maritime spatial planning (MSP). The data play a central role in classifying the ecological status of Ireland’s coastal and transitional waters, and in guiding conservation and planning decisions.
The dataset is now accessible via the Marine Institute’s Data Catalogue (through ERDDAP) and through the National Biodiversity Data Centre’s (NBDC) biodiversity maps tool, Ireland’s national platform for biodiversity information.
Members of the public can use the NBDC maps tool to explore which species have been recorded in their local bay, estuary or coastline, from Clew Bay to Galway Bay and beyond.
