If you haven’t spent time with Simons CMAP lately, visiting reveals multiple new updates.
by Helen Hill for CBIOMES
Originally envisaged by the UW Group as an Ocean Atlas — to allow for the ready retrieval of data relevant to the biogeography of phytoplankton in the North Pacific and North Atlantic Ocean, today, Simons CMAP has expanded beyond this original purview and is fulfilling its promise as an open-source data portal interconnecting model output, satellite products and research cruise data sets across oceanographic disciplines, enabling both scientists and the public to dive into and explore the vast and often under-utilized bodies of imported data.
February 2021 saw multiple updates designed to improve user experience and increase ease and efficacy of data access and handling. Among those new features:
Enhanced Search
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- Quickly and easily filter by data type (model, observation), sensor, and ocean basin
- Find datasets and variables by temporal and spatial coverage
Cruises and datasets linked in both directions
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- Easily link to all related datasets when viewing a cruise page
- Quickly link to all cruises that contributed to a dataset from the dataset page.
Favorites feature
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- Select datasets from the catalog as ‘favorites’ to access later, and to easily access on the visualization page.
Login/registration is no longer required unless submitting a dataset, or to retain favorites over time
Faster page load times
If you haven’t visited recently, you can check out all the upgrades at https://simonscmap.com/. Explore the growing data catalog (which now includes over 200 datasets); visualize cruises and cruise data using handy and intuitive visualization tools; educate yourself about how to engage with the CMAP datasets using your language of choice eg R, Python, Julia, or Matlab; and finally, consider sharing new datasets with the larger marine microbial biogeography community by learning how to submit data for ingestion into the CMAP database.
A preprint of the paper documenting the development of Simons CMAP also recently went online at bioRxiv:
Mohammad D. Ashkezari, Norland R. Hagen, Michael Denholtz, Andrew Neang, Tansy C. Burns, Rhomda L. Morales, Charlotte P. Lee, Christopher N. Hill (2021), Simons Collaborative Marine Atlas Project (Simons CMAP): an open-source portal to share, visualize and analyze ocean data, bioRxiv, doi: 10.1101/2021.02.16.431537
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