About Benthos

The guiding star

The seabed —and every hard-to-reach place— is uncovered piece by piece, like a puzzle of billions of pieces to which we add only a few each day. The idea guiding Benthos is that every survey, every annotation, should not be left adrift: that it should add to a model able to recreate what we have not yet seen —estimating the terrain and the life there might be in unexplored areas—, always with its uncertainty up front, refining itself when the real data arrives.

Knowledge stops adding up and starts composing: each piece refines the model of every gap.

This is the project's horizon, not a promise for today. We say it so the direction Benthos looks in is clear: today's annotations are tomorrow's training data.

Rigour: never dress the imagined as certainty

Benthos always tells the measured from the estimated, and says so plainly. Observed depth (instantaneous, tide included) is reduced to a declared datum; the tide can be observed (a real tide gauge) or predicted (a model), and each point shows whether its value is genuine or extrapolated and how far it is from the real data. When several sources agree, their concordance is shown; when one fails, it degrades gracefully and warns, without breaking the view or inventing anything.

The same principle applies to this website. Our clients' survey data is confidential and belongs to them, so we never show it: the scenes you can explore here are realistic recreations —fictional places, real species and terrain types, the real workflow—, labelled as such. The software is real and in production.

Standards and interoperability

Benthos does not tie data to any one platform: it is meant to leave and live alongside any data infrastructure —institutional repositories and European and international networks (OBIS, GBIF, EMODnet)— wherever it is deployed:

• Coordinates in WGS84 (EPSG:4326); exports reprojectable to the local coordinate reference system of each installation (for example ETRS89 / UTM).
• Vector export: GeoJSON, GeoPackage, CSV, KML and Shapefile (opens in QGIS, ArcGIS, Google Earth, LibreOffice Calc or Excel…), with a citable dataset metadata block for reports.
• Darwin Core Archive for publishing species occurrences to OBIS/GBIF, and ISO 19115 / INSPIRE metadata.
• OGC API – Features (the successor to WFS), to use Benthos as a live layer in QGIS or ArcGIS, and NetCDF (CF) of the survey track.
• In preparation Roadmap: GeoTIFF/COG (with real bathymetry) and OGC WMS map services.

Attributions

Tide

• FES2022 — predicted tides. Generated with AVISO+ products (CNES/LEGOS/Noveltis), distributed by AVISO+ (aviso.altimetry.fr).
• EOT20 — predicted tides. Hart-Davis et al. (2021), DGFI-TUM; SEANOE (CC-BY 4.0).
• Tide gauge — observed sea level: IOC Sea Level Monitoring (VLIZ/UNESCO), ioc-sealevelmonitoring.org.

Cartography and libraries

• Leaflet and Leaflet-Geoman (2D map and geometry editing), Three.js (3D terrain) and hls.js (adaptive video playback) — free software.
• @oksigenia/access-panel — the accessibility panel of the viewer and of this website. By Oksigenia SL, MIT licence (github.com/OksigeniaSL/oksigenia-web-libs); derived from the oksigenia-access WordPress plugin by the same author (GPLv2+).
• Brand typeface Space Grotesk (SIL Open Font License).
• The base map depends on the layer configured at each installation; its attribution appears on the map itself.

Scientific data

The scientific data shown in the viewer (video, bathymetry, annotations, species) belong to the institution that owns each installation. Benthos is the tool that presents them; credit for the data goes to those who generate it.

Accessibility

The Benthos viewer

Benthos is developed to meet WCAG 2.2 level AA —the reference of the European standard EN 301 549 and, for public-sector deployments in Spain, of RD 1112/2018. Current status: partially conformant (self-assessment, August 2026).

It already includes: an in-house accessibility panel (text size and spacing, high contrast, visible focus, colour-blindness filters, large targets); keyboard operation with visible focus and a skip-to-content link; accessible names on controls; AA text contrast; respect for "reduce motion"; and, in the data, colour-blind-safe palettes —colour is never the only channel: the exact value is always one click away.

Known limitations: video, the map and the 3D terrain are visual media that cannot be fully conveyed to a screen reader; the data is also offered in the document (annotation list, values and export) as an equivalent. Validation with automated tools and with a screen reader, and some keyboard improvements in menus, are still pending; the formal statement for a specific deployment is issued by the entity that publishes it.

This website

benthos.app follows the same target (WCAG 2.2 AA). It offers the same accessibility panel (button at the bottom right), full keyboard navigation with visible focus, a skip-to-content link, text alternatives for every animation and diagram, and it respects "reduce motion": with that setting —or with "Pause animations" in the panel— the animated scenes become still images and every interaction keeps working. Status: partially conformant (self-assessment, September 2026; formal validation pending).

If you find a barrier, write to us at privacidad@oksigenia.com and we will fix it.

To those who taught us to love the deep

Benthos exists thanks to centuries of curiosity, courage and imagination. Every now and then, from their underwater peace, their spirits appear for an instant before the diving helmet's glass and visit us on the viewer's start screen. This is for them:

Leonardo da Vinci (1452)· Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806)· Charles Darwin (1809)· Edward Forbes (1815)· Jules Verne (1828)· Captain Nemo· Charles Wyville Thomson (1830)· Ernst Haeckel (1834)· Isaac Peral (1851)· Odón de Buen (1863)· William Beebe (1877)· Rachel Carson (1907)· Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910)· Eugenie Clark (1922)· Jacques Piccard (1922)· Sylvia Earle (1935)

Is someone missing? Write to us: this tribute keeps growing.