The Intertidal Update - October 2024
Happy spooky season! We hope you’re safely navigating the scheduling horrors of the week when part of the world has switched their clocks back but the other part hasn’t.
This month’s big news is the launch of the Nature Data Sharing Initiative: a package of guidance, worksheets, and templates to support data holders and data seekers in safely and ethically sharing valuable, high quality data and information. There’s a model data use agreement and a checklist for key concepts to consider in any contract. We’ve been working with Cecil.earth on this effort for the past year and are so proud to see it out in the wild. Please take a look, test it, and comment on it. It’s the kind of partnership project across nonprofits, private companies, and communities that we love to see and try to cultivate at Intertidal.
Two other tools for your October:
If you know a place where high resolution satellite imagery could help monitor biodiversity, Planet’s Project Centinela has an open application process for teams to access their data.
This 2023 piece comparing flood risk models for the U.S. is getting new attention after the devastation of Hurricane Helene. If you read the Bloomberg News article mentioned in our August newsletter, you’ll recall the challenges of comparing model outputs when either or both the models and the training data may be private. Jeff Masters walks through how to think through the different information sources from the perspective of a person evaluating their own risk. I don't have a comparable review for our global readers, but maybe you do? Or you can purchase a risk assessment from Moody’s Insurance.
Let’s close out on an artistic note, with a little bit of a candlelit vibe. Jon Keegan visualizes public data sets at his aptly named site Beautiful Public Data, and he posts documentation if you want to follow in his keystrokes. This image of southern Louisiana is from a series using AIS data - the Automatic Identification System devices carried by boats and ships.
You can see the bright line of barges coming down the Mississippi river, and the ship tracks out to oil and gas platforms. Like airline trackers, public AIS data helps vessels avoid collisions with each other and helps ports and harbors manage traffic. Not all vessels carry AIS now, but as the oceans get more crowded there’s a growing call to require it so that everyone can stay in their lane.
Want to keep talking about making ocean data more open & accessible? Drop us a line.
— Kate & Rachael
Special thanks for conversations and inspiration this month:
Walt Reid, Susan Nesbitt, Jarrett Byrnes, Hannah Lachance, Jeanette Gann, Brett Johnson, Cisco Werner, Jay Odell, Tony MacDonald, Greg Tananbaum, and the data sharing Slack channel at the Nature Tech Collective.