The Intertidal Update - Jan 2024
Hello from the Intertidal Agency team! We’re starting 2024 off with some fresh energy, a new website, and a renewed focus on building ocean data partnerships. If you’re receiving this, you subscribed to our newsletters back when we were on Tiny Letter (and thanks to everyone who said they missed us). We’ve ported over to Buttondown, which will also give you easy options to subscribe, unsubscribe, and share our musings on all things ocean, tech, and data.
What we’re reading
Two big new papers came out on tracking ocean vessels: one in Nature and one in ICES Journal of Marine Science. They’re big not only in terms of what they found but also how they’re published, with open data, methods, and detailed workflows. These are great models for sharing what you discover and making sure others can follow in your footsteps (or vessel tracks).
We’re keeping an eye on the fast moving space of AI policy, since one of the big demands for ocean data is for training AI models. David Evan Harris and his students at UC Berkeley are translating the latest US policy statements into “human-readable” editions, with the option for collaborative commenting. If you want annotations and explanations to help you make sense of these technical memos, start here.
What we’re doing
We’re excited to be partnering with the Regional Wildlife Science Collaborative on Offshore Wind to support their data governance work. The group has just released their Science Plan to guide monitoring research around wind power in the Northeast Atlantic and we’ll be helping with things like drafting data sharing agreements, mapping the data ecosystem, building data catalogs, and generally supporting people connecting their data across all the institutions, silos, and sensors.
We’re also working with the Open Environmental Data Project on community data hubs and scoping new projects off the U.S. West Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico. If you’re interested in co-designing better ocean data programs or setting up data sharing partnerships, let us know. It’s our winter season for planning, reading, writing, and germinating ideas.
Where to find us
Kate will be at the AGU Ocean Sciences meeting in New Orleans talking about our data governance work on Tue, Feb 20th, and helping out with UN Ocean Decade sessions in her role as Data Committee co-chair. Come by if you’re in NOLA!
We’ll leave you with one of the first photos of a baby white shark, captured from a drone by photographer Carlos Guana. It’s only a few hours old and already 1.5m long.
-Kate & Rachael