Ocean Science Community Research Articles

Assessing the global ocean science community: understanding international collaboration, concerns and the current state of ocean basin research

Web of Science data covering 2000–2020 was used to analyse trends in ocean research, specific to the five ocean basins (Arctic, Atlantic, Indian, Pacific, Southern), to investigate its state and any underlying concerns for addressing UN Decade of Ocean Science goals and UN Sustainable Development Goal 14 “Life Below Water”. Though Atlantic research has dominated, Pacific research is nearing parity with its neighbour due to significant output growth by China and is soon likely to become the most researched basin. International collaboration, built around G7 countries and China, has increased by 10 percentage points since 2000 but research remains mainly domestic. Outside these countries, there has been growth in collaborations involving Small Island Developing States and a doubling of South America’s global share of ocean basin papers. However, sub-Saharan African research output has not mirrored this expansion. Further growth could be catalysed by increased support for educational efforts and infrastructure development, particularly given the highly specialised and institutionally driven nature of ocean basin research.

Community Perspectives on Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Ocean Sciences: A Town Hall Discussion

Professional and scientific societies are increasingly engaging in efforts to create a science community that manifests justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI). However, progress assessment is challenging, and opportunities for community feedback are limited. During the 2022 Ocean Sciences Meeting, the Oceanography Society (TOS) JEDI committee led an interactive Town Hall to collect feedback from conference participants and TOS membership on three themes: challenges, initiatives, and opportunities related to advancing JEDI in ocean sciences. This Town Hall was preceded by a survey that was administered to the TOS membership. Survey respondents and Town Hall participants provided valuable observations and synthesis on the past, present, and future of JEDI work in ocean sciences. Discussion included both positive efforts and outcomes of JEDI work as well as harmful and ineffective practices. This paper synthesizes feedback received and highlights ways in which the ocean sciences community and professional and scientific societies can advance similar work. Gatekeeping, a system of implicit or explicit cultural and institutional constraints to and requirements for entry into a field, was identified as the most significant challenge to diversifying the ocean sciences. The majority of survey respondents agreed that efforts to broaden participation have been successful, and identified specific initiatives that have been effective, including the development and support of mentorship and training programs and partnerships with minority-serving institutions. Some challenges to advancing JEDI initiatives include targeted recruitment from the most “elite” institutions and “parachute science.” Respondents agreed that professional and scientific societies have an important role to play in advancing JEDI in ocean sciences. Participants discussed strategies to broaden participation, including efforts that can be employed by professional and scientific societies such as regular data collection on demographics, improved information sharing, and stricter codes of conduct at professional meetings. We conclude by summarizing some new TOS-led initiatives that are designed to promote JEDI in ocean sciences and beyond.

JEDI Events and Programming for OSM 2024

The global ocean sciences community gathers once every two years for the Ocean Sciences Meeting (OSM) to share research findings, educational advances, technological developments, and applications to management. The meeting provides an opportunity to network with colleagues and forge new connections with ocean scientists from around the world. It is also a time to work toward and reflect on efforts to create a more just, equitable, diverse, and inclusive ocean sciences community.

Black Women in Ocean Science: Barriers to Advancement and Strategies to Move Forward

Less than 2% of graduate students and 1% of tenured faculty in Earth, atmospheric, and ocean sciences identify as Black or African-American. Discussions about diversifying ocean sciences are incomplete without acknowledging the distinctive challenges faced by Black women. We present new survey data on the dominant barriers to entry within the field, which can result from racism and discrimination, financial difficulties, and lack of accessibility. We also discuss mitigation strategies that can be employed, with the hope that the entire ocean science community can collaborate to foster a culture of inclusion. We cannot have a healthy ocean if we do not support everyone who wants to study it.

Assessing Diversity in US Ocean Science Institutions: Insights from Fifteen Years (2007–2021) of OSER Data

Increasing representation of racially underrepresented groups and women in the ocean sciences has been a priority for the last few decades. The Ocean Science Educators’ Retreat (OSER) data set is perhaps the only long-standing data set specifically focused, with subdisciplinary granularity, on the US academic ocean science landscape. We examine its valuable data on graduate student and faculty demographics across racial and gender dimensions to understand trends in diversity of graduate students (recruitment and retention) and faculty in US institutions over a 15-year period (2007–2021). We also discuss potential COVID-19 signals and attention to social justice in these data, based on the last year of data collection (2020–2021). Finally, we make suggestions for future studies to build on these findings and the OSER data set. This paper highlights opportunities for further broadening diverse participation in ocean sciences, such as through greater emphasis on retention, and makes a case for the ocean science community to continue demographic data collection.

Catalyzing Remote Collaboration During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond: Early Career Oceanographers Adopt Hybrid Open Science Framework

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced many challenges for research scientists: reduction of lab and field observation collection and in-person meetings. These new constraints forced researchers to remote work and virtual networking, dramatically influencing scientific inquiry. Such challenges are compounded for those in early stages of their career, where data collection and networking are vital to be seen as productive. However, during this trying time of remote work, we, as a collective of early-career oceanographers, were actively developing and improving on an already-existent hybrid community of practice. Through our experiences, we believe this type of framework can enhance virtual collaboration to the point that it outlasts the pandemic and helps create new synergies that will diversify and enhance scientific inquiry within the ocean science community. We describe a hybrid community of practice and an example workflow that models effective collaboration. We have found that three components to this model are necessary for effective collaboration, inspiration, and communication: 1) openly accessible data, 2) software, computational, and professional-development resources, and 3) a team science approach. In our experience, both the in-person and remote aspects of the model are important. In person collaboration is key to expanding the community of practice and invigorating those already within the community. Remote collaboration has been critical for effective collaborations between in-person activities and has proven to maximize outputs during in-person collaborations. While the three components of this model are not new to the scientific community, we believe that utilizing them strategically post-pandemic will diversify and expand scientific collaboration in oceanography.

The Oceans 2.0/3.0 Data Management and Archival System

The advent of large-scale cabled ocean observatories brought about the need to handle large amounts of ocean-based data, continuously recorded at a high sampling rate over many years and made accessible in near-real time to the ocean science community and the public. Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) commenced installing and operating two regional cabled observatories on Canada’s Pacific Coast, VENUS inshore and NEPTUNE offshore in the 2000s, and later expanded to include observatories in the Atlantic and Arctic in the 2010s. The first data streams from the cabled instrument nodes started flowing in February 2006. This paper describes Oceans 2.0 and Oceans 3.0, the comprehensive Data Management and Archival System that ONC developed to capture all data and associated metadata into an ever-expanding dynamic database. Oceans 2.0 was the name for this software system from 2006–2021; in 2022, ONC revised this name to Oceans 3.0, reflecting the system’s many new and planned capabilities aligning with Web 3.0 concepts. Oceans 3.0 comprises both tools to manage the data acquisition and archival of all instrumental assets managed by ONC as well as end-user tools to discover, process, visualize and download the data. Oceans 3.0 rests upon ten foundational pillars: (1) A robust and stable system architecture to serve as the backbone within a context of constant technological progress and evolving needs of the operators and end users; (2) a data acquisition and archival framework for infrastructure management and data recording, including instrument drivers and parsers to capture all data and observatory actions, alongside task management options and support for data versioning; (3) a metadata system tracking all the details necessary to archive Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reproducible (FAIR) data from all scientific and non-scientific sensors; (4) a data Quality Assurance and Quality Control lifecycle with a consistent workflow and automated testing to detect instrument, data and network issues; (5) a data product pipeline ensuring the data are served in a wide variety of standard formats; (6) data discovery and access tools, both generalized and use-specific, allowing users to find and access data of interest; (7) an Application Programming Interface that enables scripted data discovery and access; (8) capabilities for customized and interactive data handling such as annotating videos or ingesting individual campaign-based data sets; (9) a system for generating persistent data identifiers and data citations, which supports interoperability with external data repositories; (10) capabilities to automatically detect and react to emergent events such as earthquakes. With a growing database and advancing technological capabilities, Oceans 3.0 is evolving toward a future in which the old paradigm of downloading packaged data files transitions to the new paradigm of cloud-based environments for data discovery, processing, analysis, and exchange.

The Marine Biodiversity Observation Network Plankton Workshops: Plankton Ecosystem Function, Biodiversity, and Forecasting—Research Requirements and Applications

The Marine Biodiversity Observation Network Plankton Workshops: Plankton Ecosystem Function, Biodiversity, and Forecasting—Research Requirements and Applications

JEDI Events and Programming for OSM 2022

The biennial Ocean Sciences Meeting (OSM) is the most extensive opportunity for members of the global ocean sciences community to come together to share knowledge, network, build and strengthen collaborations, and grow ideas. In addition to sharing progress in research, technology, and education, these meetings are a valuable opportunity to advance diversity and inclusivity in the ocean sciences community. OSM 2020 featured several successful events and sessions with these themes, and reflection on them since then has been valuable for guiding further diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts at our home institutions and for planning future conferences (Behl et al., 2021, in this issue; Le Bras, 2021).

The September Issue: Some Things Old and Some Things New

We have an exciting lineup for you in this September issue of Oceanography, touching many of the bases that make our journal stand out within the ocean sciences community. In addition to traditional science articles, we have a paper on belonging, accessibility, justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (BE A JEDI); another on capacity-building in the ocean sciences; and a DIY Oceanography contribution. This issue’s education section features columns on undergraduate teaching and careers post graduate school, and we present a new Navigating Grad School section. We also have a book review to share, and the third consecutive column from the TOS JEDI Committee.

The Intertwined Futures of Whales and Humans

If you could somehow ask a North Atlantic right whale what she thinks the future holds, what would she say? Right whales must, in some way, think about the future in order to make survival decisions. As an ocean science community, our eyes are trained increasingly on the future as well. The twin global environmental crises of climate change and biodiversity loss have elevated the science of real-world prediction to one of urgent interest. At timescales ranging from hours to decades, society is asking ocean science for actionable predictions, projections, and forecasts, with the hope of mitigating and adapting to the changing ocean. Meeting this challenge requires more than the ability to predict ocean dynamics.

Visiting Scientists Provide Capacity Development: Lessons Learned by POGO and SCOR

To enable the sustainable use of their ocean resources, capacity for ocean science and observations is important for every coastal nation. In many developing areas of the world, capability for ocean science and observations is not yet adequate to meet management needs. International organizations have employed a variety of capacity development approaches to assist developing countries in building self-sustaining ocean science and observational communities. This article describes the lessons learned from visiting scientist programs conducted for more than a decade by the Partnership for Observation of the Global Ocean (POGO) and the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) that dispatched ocean scientists to developing countries to train hundreds of individuals in a variety of ocean science and observation topics and techniques. From these programs, SCOR and POGO have learned that training in-country has multiple benefits to trainees, host institutions, and trainers, benefits that are not achievable when students leave their countries. These benefits include more cost-effective training on issues relevant to the host institutions using locally available technology, as well as the ability to reach a large number of trainees. Lessons learned from the POGO and SCOR programs can be used to inform the future capacity-development activities of POGO and SCOR, as well as other organizations, to improve, enhance, and expand the use of in-country training and mentoring. Such approaches could contribute to the capacity development efforts of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development.

Changing the Culture of Coastal, Ocean, and Marine Sciences: Strategies for Individual and Collective Actions

Geoscience is plagued with structural and systemic barriers that prevent people of historically excluded groups from fully participating in, contributing to, and accruing the benefits of geosciences. A change in the culture of our learning and working environments is required to dismantle barriers and promote belonging, accessibility, justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in our field. Inspired by a session organized at the 2020 Ocean Sciences Meeting, the goal of this paper is to provide a consolidated summary of a few innovative and broadening participation initiatives that are being led by various stakeholders in academia (e.g., students, faculty, administrative leaders) at different institutional levels (e.g., universities, professional societies). The authors hope that the strategies outlined in this paper will inspire the coastal, ocean, and marine science community to take individual and collective actions that lead to a positive culture change.

Diversifying the Ocean Sciences: Thoughts on the Challenge Ahead

The lack of diversity in the ocean sciences is not a particularly big secret or a recent issue. In his inaugural column in 2000 for The Oceanography Classroom, Dean McManus wrote: “A particular challenge for higher education is to include more members of underrepresented groups in the study of the ocean. Fifteen years from now, 40% of the traditional undergraduate-age population will consist of these underrepresented groups, but today the ocean sciences have the lowest participation by underrepresented groups of any science.” Despite this prescient statement from McManus, little progress has been made in diversifying the ranks of the ocean sciences. In a recent National Science Foundation survey of current graduate students in the ocean sciences, approximately 8.8% of those surveyed identify as coming from a group that is considered part of a minority community in the United States (Black, Hispanic/Latinx, Native Alaskan, Native American, Pacific Islander). As might be expected, these numbers are even worse for the professional ranks of agencies, nonprofits, and university programs that focus on the ocean sciences. The lack of these communities’ representation in ocean science careers is underscored by the past year’s news reports, brimming as they have been with the brutality and injustices that those in BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities face daily. The STEM community, including the ocean sciences, is now, more than ever, being forced to confront the ways in which its institutions and culture contribute to the inequities facing BIPOC communities. Here, I draw upon my dual identity as a member of the ocean science and Latinx communities to discuss how the ocean sciences can enact meaningful changes around improving diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Ocean Science Diplomacy can Be a Game Changer to Promote the Access to Marine Technology in Latin America and the Caribbean

Ocean science is central in providing evidence for the implementation of the United Nations Law of the Sea Convention. The Convention’s provisions on transfer of marine technology to developing countries aim at strengthening scientific capabilities to promote equitable opportunities for these countries to exercise rights and obligations in managing the marine environment. Decades after the adoption of the Convention, these provisions are under implemented, despite the efforts of international organizations, such as IOC-UNESCO. Latin America and the Caribbean struggle to conduct marine scientific research and seize the opportunities of blue economy due to the limited access to state-of-the-art technology. Ocean science communities in these countries are subject to constraints not foreseeing in international treaties, such as unstable exchange rates, taxation, fees for transportation, costs of maintenance and calibration of technology, challenges to comply with technical standards, and intellectual property rights. Action is needed to overcome these challenges by promoting a closer tie between science and diplomacy. We discuss that this interplay between science and international relations, as we frame science diplomacy, can inform on how to progress in allowing countries in this region to develop relevant research and implement the Convention. We provide concrete examples of this transfer of marine technology and ways forward, in particular in the context of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030).

The Subterranean Estuary: Technical Term, Simple Analogy, or Source of Confusion?

AbstractTwenty years ago, the term subterranean estuary was proposed by Moore (1999, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0304-4203(99)00014-6) as a call of attention to the ocean sciences community about the importance of coastal groundwater systems, which can compete in relevance and impact to oceans with fresh runoff coming from the continent. Coastal aquifers were presented as an analogy to surface estuaries in that water of different density comes together and establishes a saline wedge underlying fresher water. In the past two decades, the use of this term has expanded. Initially limited to studies with an oceanographic viewpoint considering the impact of groundwater on the ocean, it is now common in the literature, competing with classical hydrogeological terminology such as coastal aquifer or seawater intrusion and reaching publications with a traditional hydrogeological focus. The popularity of this terminology suggests that it fills a need not met by existing coastal hydrogeological terms, although these classical terms have their roots in a long history of study of coastal groundwater. This term may serve to enhance communications between the traditionally disparate communities of hydrogeology and ocean sciences—imbricating saltwater intrusion studies with marine sciences and bringing an opportunity to enhance interactions. But does the term also carry an element of confusion? This essay is intended to open a discussion within the coastal research community about the use and meaning of terminology in future studies of coastal and offshore groundwater systems.

William (Bill) Peterson's contributions to ocean science, management, and policy

In addition to being an esteemed marine ecologist and oceanographer, William T. (Bill) Peterson was a dedicated public servant, a leader in the ocean science community, and a mentor to a generation of scientists. Bill recognized the importance of applied science and the need for integrated “big science” programs to advance our understanding of ecosystems and to guide their management. As the first US GLOBEC program manager, he was pivotal in transitioning the concept of understanding how climate change impacts marine ecosystems to an operational national research program. The scientific insight and knowledge generated by US GLOBEC informed and advanced the ecosystem-based management approaches now being implemented for fishery management in the US. Bill held significant leadership roles in numerous international efforts to understand global and regional ecological processes, and organized and chaired a number of influential scientific conferences and their proceedings. He was passionate about working with and training young researchers. Bill’s academic affiliations, notably at Stony Brook and Oregon State Universities, enabled him to advise, train, and mentor a host of students, post-doctoral researchers, and laboratory technicians. Under his collegial guidance they became critical independent thinkers and diligent investigators. His former students and colleagues carry on Bill Peterson’s legacy of research that helps us understand marine ecosystems and informs more effective resource stewardship and conservation.

The Development of a Canadian Integrated Ocean Observing System (CIOOS)

Ocean observation is fundamental to Canada’s ocean science community. The federal government, academia, small businesses, not-for-profit organizations, and other research partners, collect and synthesize physical, chemical and biological observations for research purposes, to model ocean changes, to support resource management decision-making, and to establish baseline data for long-term monitoring. Aside from building comprehensive ocean observatories (Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) et al. 2010), there is no easy mechanism to integrate the large amounts of data from the various sources or to explore interrelationships among variables, and no coordination and collaboration mechanism for the ocean community as a whole to generate an efficient system (Ocean Science and Technology Partnership (OSTP), for Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) 2011). Consequently, we observe fragmented and isolated data that is only discoverable by a limited range of end users. Canada’s ocean science community (Wallace et al. 2014), led and supported by Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), is developing a Canadian Integrated Ocean Observation System (CIOOS) that brings together and leverages existing Canadian and international ocean observation data into a federated data system. This system (Wilson et al. 2016) will improve coordination and collaboration among diverse data producers, improve access to information for decision making, and enable discovery and access to data to support a wide variety of applied and theoretical research efforts to better understand, monitor, and manage activities in Canada’s oceans. Canada is implementing a CIOOS test-phase, which will eventually lead to the development of a robust and integrated observing system, improving connections between end users and providers of ocean observations. The improved coordination of regional and national efforts within CIOOS will contribute to global ocean observing, maximizing the overall benefit of integrated observing.

Going Beyond Standard Ocean Color Observations: Lidar and Polarimetry

Passive ocean color images have provided a sustained synoptic view of the distribution of ocean optical properties and color and biogeochemical parameters for the past 20-plus years. These images have revolutionized our view of the ocean. Remote sensing of ocean color has relied on measurements of the radiance emerging at the top of the atmosphere, thus neglecting the polarization and the vertical components. Ocean color remote sensing utilizes the intensity and spectral variation of visible light scattered upward from beneath the ocean surface to derive concentrations of biogeochemical constituents and inherent optical properties within the ocean surface layer. However, these measurements have some limitations. Specifically, the measured property is a weighted-integrated value over a relatively shallow depth, it provides no information during the night and retrievals are compromised by clouds, absorbing aerosols, and low Sun zenithal angles. In addition, ocean color data provide limited information on the morphology and size distribution of marine particles. Major advances in our understanding of global ocean ecosystems will require measurements from new technologies, specifically lidar and polarimetry. These new techniques have been widely used for atmospheric applications but have not had as much as interest from the ocean color community. This is due to many factors including limited access to in-situ instruments and/or space-borne sensors and lack of attention in university courses and ocean science summer schools curricula. However, lidar and polarimetry technology will complement standard ocean color products by providing depth-resolved values of attenuation and scattering parameters and additional information about particle morphology and chemical composition. This review aims at presenting the basics of these techniques, examples of applications and at advocating for the development of in-situ and space-borne sensors. Recommendations are provided on actions that would foster the embrace of lidar and polarimetry as powerful remote sensing tools by the ocean science community.

Gaussian Integrals and Rice Series in Crossing Distributions—to Compute the Distribution of Maxima and Other Features of Gaussian Processes

We describe and compare how methods based on the classical Rice’s formula for the expected number, and higher moments, of level crossings by a Gaussian process stand up to contemporary numerical methods to accurately deal with crossing related characteristics of the sample paths. We illustrate the relative merits in accuracy and computing time of the Rice moment methods and the exact numerical method, developed since the late 1990s, on three groups of distribution problems, the maximum over a finite interval and the waiting time to first crossing, the length of excursions over a level, and the joint period/amplitude of oscillations. We also treat the notoriously difficult problem of dependence between successive zero crossing distances. The exact solution has been known since at least 2000, but it has remained largely unnoticed outside the ocean science community. Extensive simulation studies illustrate the accuracy of the numerical methods. As a historical introduction an attempt is made to illustrate the relation between Rice’s original formulation and arguments and the exact numerical methods.