Evolving and sustaining ocean best practices and standards for the next decade

The oceans play a key role in global issues such as climate change, food security, and human health. Given their vast dimensions and internal complexity, efficient monitoring and predicting of the planet’s ocean must be a collaborative effort of both regional and global scale. A first and foremost requirement for such collaborative ocean observing is the need to follow well-defined and reproducible methods across activities: from strategies for structuring observing systems, sensor deployment and usage, and the generation of data and information products, to ethical and governance aspects when executing ocean observing. To meet the urgent, planet-wide challenges we face, methods across all aspects of ocean observing should be broadly adopted by the ocean community and, where appropriate, should evolve into “Ocean Best Practices.” While many groups have created best practices, they are scattered across the Web or buried in local repositories and many have yet to be digitized. To reduce this fragmentation, we introduce a new open access, permanent, digital repository of best practices documentation (oceanbestpractices.org) that is part of the Ocean Best Practices System (OBPS). The new OBPS provides an opportunity space for the centralized and coordinated improvement of ocean observing methods. The OBPS repository employs user-friendly software to significantly improve discovery and access to methods. The software includes advanced semantic technologies for search capabilities to enhance repository operations. In addition to the repository, the OBPS also includes a peer reviewed journal research topic, a forum for community discussion and a training activity for use of best practices. Together, these components serve to realize a core objective of the OBPS, which is to enable the ocean community to create superior methods for every activity in ocean observing from research to operations to applications that are agreed upon and broadly adopted across communities. Using selected ocean observing examples, we show how the OBPS supports this objective. This paper lays out a future vision of ocean best practices and how OBPS will contribute to improving ocean observing in the decade to come

Stress testing the EU monitoring capacity for the Blue economy

An EMODnet activity has started in 2013 to assess how well the European marine monitoring data meets the requirements of a sustainable blue economy. The activity is done by six European Sea Basin Checkpoints listed in the EMODnet central web page: http://www.emodnet.eu/checkpoints. Checkpoints should develop an assessment framework that considers “Use Cases” or “Challenges” to evaluate the fitness for use of input monitoring data sets. The Challenge products are related to both Blue Growth and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive objectives. The idea is that the quality of the Challenge products will inform stakeholders on how monitoring data set are “fit for use”. The Checkpoint assessment framework developed for the Mediterranean Sea is implemented through a “Service” composed of: 1) a GIS metadatabase with information about upstream data sources for Challenge products and availability indicators; 2) a Web GIS product display, encompassing links to the upstream data sources; 3) a tool to evaluate and display the statistics of assessment indicators. User requirements are recorded in the product catalogue (Data Product Specifications), which can be viewed for corrective actions. The same assessment framework is now being applied to the Atlantic and the Black Sea thus producing in the near future the first large basin scale assessment of input monitoring data set adequacy for applications.DG MAREPublished415-4224A. Oceanografia e climaN/A or not JC

Emodnet Atlantic checkpoint : data adequacy to EU challenges

After a time when observations of the sea have been made for specific purposes, e.g. for specific national purposes or to demonstrate a technological capability, the European Commission has now moved to a new paradigm where data are collected once and used them for as many purposes as possible. This means relying preferably on users rather than on producers to assess existing data sets and data sources and promote recommendations for a better satisfaction of their needs. The EMODNET Atlantic checkpoint (http://www.emodnet-atlantic.eu/) was designed to evaluate the fitness-for-use of current observations and data assembly programs towards 11 marine applications and prioritizing the needs to optimize monitoring systems at the scale of the North Atlantic Ocean

Evolving and sustaining ocean best practices and standards for the next decade

The oceans play a key role in global issues such as climate change, food security, and human health. Given their vast dimensions and internal complexity, efficient monitoring and predicting of the planet’s ocean must be a collaborative effort of both regional and global scale. A first and foremost requirement for such collaborative ocean observing is the need to follow well-defined and reproducible methods across activities: from strategies for structuring observing systems, sensor deployment and usage, and the generation of data and information products, to ethical and governance aspects when executing ocean observing. To meet the urgent, planet-wide challenges we face, methods across all aspects of ocean observing should be broadly adopted by the ocean community and, where appropriate, should evolve into “Ocean Best Practices.” While many groups have created best practices, they are scattered across the Web or buried in local repositories and many have yet to be digitized. To reduce this fragmentation, we introduce a new open access, permanent, digital repository of best practices documentation (oceanbestpractices.org) that is part of the Ocean Best Practices System (OBPS). The new OBPS provides an opportunity space for the centralized and coordinated improvement of ocean observing methods. The OBPS repository employs user-friendly software to significantly improve discovery and access to methods. The software includes advanced semantic technologies for search capabilities to enhance repository operations. In addition to the repository, the OBPS also includes a peer reviewed journal research topic, a forum for community discussion and a training activity for use of best practices. Together, these components serve to realize a core objective of the OBPS, which is to enable the ocean community to create superior methods for every activity in ocean observing from research to operations to applications that are agreed upon and broadly adopted across communities. Using selected ocean observing examples, we show how the OBPS supports this objective. This paper lays out a future vision of ocean best practices and how OBPS will contribute to improving ocean observing in the decade to come