Congratulations to our first class of ocean data stewardship graduates! On May 26, our first cohort's training wrapped up with short presentations from each participant on what they learned – and what they plan to do next.

We’re honored and delighted that all of our thirteen participants rated it highly and said they would recommend it to others with feedback like this:

“This was by far one of the most important and practical training programs I have attended. It gave me a clear understanding of why data stewardship is key and how essential it is to embed it into our daily work.”

We were able to offer this three month course for free thanks to a grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. We also owe our success to our amazing guest speakers who provided real-world context on ocean data stewardship in practice.

We’re currently seeking support for three more trainings, so please contact us (or donate) if you’d like to help us grow the global community of ocean data stewards. We also offer custom trainings for teams and organizations, where we can go deeper into your particular ocean data goals and challenges.

While we're on the topic of data challenges, this recent white paper from the Cloud-Native Geospatial Consortium asks if we need to shift the focus from “open” data to data interoperability. This doesn't necessarily change the work that needs to be done to document and share data. If anything, it emphasizes the importance of those core data stewardship practices to make it as easy as possible for data to be reused. What if we thought about future data users (including future us) from the very start?

Good news in ocean & nature data

• It looks like those long-term ocean monitoring buoys in NSF’s Ocean Observatories Initiative are safe, for now. That’s extra good news as we enter one of the strongest El Nino events in a century.

• If you missed the whale necropolis story, we got you: here’s the Nature article and video

• We have a detailed map of 28% of the global seafloor. Only 72% left to go by 2030 - let’s go!

• Earth Genome’s map portal is now open to everyone. They’re still building out the coastal and ocean components but go check out what it looks like upstream of your favorite beach.

• The third World Ocean Assessment is out, and while it’s not all good news (and it’s not short, so I won’t pretend to have read it all) it is a good resource for global stats and trends.

Signing off this month with an artistic example of what happens when you make data reusable beyond the original purpose: write your name in Landsat images.