The Intertidal Update - Feb 2024
Happy Leap Day! It's an excellent day to be thinking about data, information, knowledge, and wisdom, since it's the product of humans mapping a 24-hour calendar onto an astronomical process that doesn't neatly divide by 24. May today's experience of (4 * 0.242190) days bring you a few delightful reflections on the meaning of time. Or perhaps an inspiration to reject the Gregorian calendar altogether, like the French Revolutionary system of days named for vegetables or tying your temporal experience to seasons and migration patterns. Special shout-out to our friends in Antarctica who will soon see their first sunset since Oct 10th.
We had great turn-out for our data governance sessions at the AGU Ocean Sciences meeting and a very productive writing session for the UN Ocean Decade Data Action Plan. The Ocean Decade team will be releasing the plan in a satellite event on April 9 in Barcelona, so please join us if you'll be there too.
New ocean data support tools just dropped
The Ocean Decade has a small-but-mighty team focused on data sharing and capacity building who recently released three new resources:
A virtual data help desk (which will feed into our in-person help desk at the Barcelona conference)
A self-paced data management course (only in English for now but they're working to translate it)
What we're reading
The Marine Technology Society released its Dialogues with Industry report on the ocean economy, highlighting the importance of growing the data and information ecosystem. More ocean data intermediaries and sandboxes? Supporting small-to- medium-sized businesses (including non-profits) to do this ocean data innovation? We're here for all that.
What we're thinking about
When we talk about our data governance work as 'the people layer' that brings together tech, policy, and purpose around data, people often light up and say "yes, we need that!" But the work also falls into the gap of many cross-program, interdisciplinary, glue efforts. It may help everyone but it's nobody's specific job. We've been working on a few projects describing out the importance of ocean data stewardship for everyone involved in a project and trying to quantify the benefits. If you have an example of an ocean project where shared data agreements, workflows, and goals helped things get done, reach out and tell us about it. There are still far too few ocean and climate examples on the Data Collaboratives Explorer.
This month's closing shot comes from a streaked shearwater wearing a videologger, showing us the ocean from a birds-eye view. Just like many fisheries EM systems, these tiny cameras use AI to selectively record important activities and save battery life.
-Kate & Rachael