The Intertidal Update - June 2025
June is officially Ocean Month all over, with big happenings at the One Ocean Science and UN Ocean Conferences in Nice, Capitol Hill Oceans Week in the U.S., and World Ocean Day everywhere. The One Ocean Finance Initiative announced $8.7 billion in funding pledges. The Blue Convergence Fund launched a call for proposals for climate resilient fisheries and the Belmont Forum is calling for multi-national, transdisciplinary projects to address ocean sustainability. The Ocean Exchange’s global call for innovators is out, which includes new ideas for data collection and analysis; you too could join the community of 1,000 Ocean Startups. For ocean people, June is a bracing wave, a collective paddle out, and a reminder that if you also secretly wish you’d pursued your childhood dream of being a marine biologist it is not too late. Wherever you are and whatever you’re spending time on, you could ocean that.
We have been spending our time publishing some of our guides for anyone to use. You can find resources for evaluating repositories, setting minimum metadata guidance, and creating data management and sharing plans. We also worked with others in the data preservation community on this “data matchmaking” worksheet, which includes common questions and information needs for people looking to move data to a new home and people looking to host that data. Try them out and tell us what you think.
We’ve also been thinking more about effectively and ethically using AI. This recent MIT Technology Review article is a thorough synthesis of what we know about AI energy use and how that could spike as AI gets integrated into everything. Personally, I’m happy to stick with real pictures of amazing ocean creatures (like methane eating spiders), but LLMs that can review 500+ page environmental reports and accurately create data tables from the PDFs? That seems like a huge improvement. If you’re trying to sort out what’s AI hype and what’s useful, the Innovation for Impact toolkits are a place to start.
We’ll both be at the ESIP summer meeting in Seattle July 21-25, helping run sessions on data publishing, repository risk assessments, and user research. In the interim, we’re mulling over all the ideas from our first two “What’s Next for Ocean Data” discussions to pull out common threads and weave them into some early actions. Thanks to everyone who has been part of those discussions so far. If you want an invite to the next one reach out and share what you’ve been thinking about the current state of ocean and climate information.
-Kate & Rachael