The Intertidal Update - March 2025
2025 started off with a bang. We’re just now catching our breath enough to get back into our newsletter cadence. While electronic newsletters may seem fast and furious and everywhere these days, we like to use ours as a space to reflect on what we’ve done and how it connects to the larger world of ocean ideas and data. Retrospectives are important for improving skills, teams, and programs but they’re easy to breeze through or skip altogether as we race from thing to thing. We’re trying to practice patience, embrace wintering, and look deeper to shape our path for this year (and beyond).
One idea we’ve been musing on is “federation,” which (in data-speak) refers to an interconnected network of data rather than a single, centralized database. Database federation is an old-school concept from the 1980s; modern engineers talk about data warehouses, lakes, mesh. The word federation dates back to the 1600s, with Latin roots for a compact across partners and for trust. Which is to say, if you’re not going to store everything in the same physical place, within a single entity, you need a “compact,” or an agreement across all the data partners on how to keep the data organized and accessible. You could think of a schema or metadata guidelines as a kind of data compact.
You also need to trust each other. Everyone has to hold up their end of the data bargain to keep all the data available. People have to trust that that data will be preserved, documented, and what it says on the label. When we hear that a data system will be federated, we think about what it will take to build the people layer of trust and agreements. If you have a favorite example of weaving data architecture and human processes together, share it with us and we’ll highlight our favorites in the next newsletter.
One of our latest projects is related to this theme: the release of the RWSC recommended data repositories list. For the last year, we’ve been working with this community of researchers and managers who monitor all kinds of ocean wildlife: bats, seabirds, turtles, fishes, marine mammals, and life on the seafloor. In some cases, they’re required to share their data by regulations or funders and in other cases they’re sharing data voluntarily to contribute to our larger understanding of the ocean. Where and how they share data affects how easy it is to discover, access, and reuse the data. We worked with the RWSC to evaluate and recommend repositories for every data type, as well as creating support tools like metadata guidelines and a data management and sharing plan template. As more data is created around offshore wind and other offshore facilities, we hope these materials make it easier to share data and ultimately lead to new insights from a growing body of ocean data, information, and knowledge.
Finally, we’ve been fielding a lot of questions about ocean data archiving and preservation. The Data Rescue Project is the place to start.
— Kate & Rachael
Special thanks for conversations and inspiration over the last few months:
Paige Roepers, Cathy Merriman, Mark Baumgartner, Jason Landrum, Jessie Mahr, Matt Price, Katie Hoeberling, Kakani Katija, Jed Sundwall, Steve Diggs, Marco Monterzino, and the Global Fishing Watch crew.