A worldwide geographical scheme for recording the distribution of marine biota: proposal and call for feedback.

This paper describes a project aimed at creating a worldwide set of polygons for recording marine distribution data, parallel to the current World Geographic Scheme for Recording Plant Distribution used on land. The countries' Exclusive Economic Zones were either taken as recording units or subdivided according to Marine Ecosystems of the World or the IHO Limits of Oceans and Seas when appropriate; existing local schemes were adopted for Europe and Australia. A hierarchical set of five Level-1 units, 26 Level-2 units, 232 Level-3 units and 536 Level-4 units is presented for feedback and intended to be submitted as a standard to the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG). This project is expected to provide a means to instantly retrieve national checklists for any taxonomic group and also a valuable tool to handle imprecise country-level records from the old literature.