Abstract
The oceans play a key role in global issues such as climate change, food security, and human health. Given their vast dimensions and internal complexity, efficient monitoring and predicting of the planet’s ocean must be a collaborative effort of both regional and global scale. A first and foremost requirement for such collaborative ocean observing is the need to follow well-defined and reproducible methods across activities: from strategies for structuring observing systems, sensor deployment and usage, and the generation of data and information products, to ethical and governance aspects when executing ocean observing. To meet the urgent, planet-wide challenges we face, methods across all aspects of ocean observing should be broadly adopted by the ocean community and, where appropriate, should evolve into “Ocean Best Practices.” While many groups have created best practices, they are scattered across the Web or buried in local repositories and many have yet to be digitized. To reduce this fragmentation, we introduce a new open access, permanent, digital repository of best practices documentation (oceanbestpractices.org) that is part of the Ocean Best Practices System (OBPS). The new OBPS provides an opportunity space for the centralized and coordinated improvement of ocean observing methods. The OBPS repository employs user-friendly software to significantly improve discovery and access to methods. The software includes advanced semantic technologies for search capabilities to enhance repository operations. In addition to the repository, the OBPS also includes a peer reviewed journal research topic, a forum for community discussion and a training activity for use of best practices. Together, these components serve to realize a core objective of the OBPS, which is to enable the ocean community to create superior methods for every activity in ocean observing from research to operations to applications that are agreed upon and broadly adopted across communities. Using selected ocean observing examples, we show how the OBPS supports this objective. This paper lays out a future vision of ocean best practices and how OBPS will contribute to improving ocean observing in the decade to come.
Highlights
The Ocean Observing ChallengeThe oceans play a key role in global issues such as climate change, food security, sustainable consumption and production and human health
Key capabilities have been identified that would make a robust environment for the development, promotion, and adoption of best practices by multiple ocean communities
This section distills the above sections into a set of recommendations that we believe will allow the Ocean Best Practice System (OBPS) to evolve to meet future needs
Summary
The oceans play a key role in global issues such as climate change, food security, sustainable consumption and production and human health. “ocean observing” can be summarized by a chain of processes addressing “why to observe?” (requirement setting process), “what to observe?” (scoping of observational foci), “how to observe?” (coordination of observing elements), and “how to integrate, use and disseminate observational outcomes and understand their impacts?” (data management, analyses and creation and assessment of information products). This chain may be executed for a single scientific project that aims to formulate or refine a hypothesis, or by an environmental agency delivering operational products (e.g., warning the public about a hazardous event). This includes the challenges of cooperation, trust, ethics and others that must be addressed if the ocean information chain is to be effective for society (Barber, 1987)
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