Editor's Note
It's now been two years since I took over as editor of this newsletter so I got a bit nostalgic and looked back on some previous issues. What really struck me (other than the questionable formatting) was the wide range of topics, all of which link to ocean best practices. From articles on Essential Ocean Variables to marine-themed recipes, from international program updates to poems about the sea, I'm proud that our newsletter seems to have found a useful balance between informative and engaging content.
On that note, in this issue, we're pleased to introduce our new Image-of-the-Month! These can be any recent or historical photo, artwork or diagram that showcases aspects of ocean observations. Please send us your Image-of-the-Month along with a short descriptive paragraph to newsletter@oceanbestpractices.org.
~ Rachel Przeslawski
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5th OBPS Community Workshop: An Ocean of Values
We're pleased to announce that the Fifth Annual OBPS Community Workshop, "An Ocean of Values" will be held from the 20th to the 24th of September! Early Information and pre-registration are available here.
We invite all members of the ocean community - including educators, scientists, citizens, artists, conservationists, cultural ambassadors, policy makers, and ocean explorers - to co-develop this workshop by proposing sessions, tracks, or other contributions that we can facilitate.
As an overarching theme, we'll be asking our participants to help us understand how to better represent and safely archive the methods, policies, guides, or standard specifications that bring value to their communities. We'll be facilitating value mapping activities across all groups, so we can better connect "how" things are done to "why" they are done and why they matter.
Stay tuned to our newsletter, the OBPS Twitter channel (@OceanPractices), or our Facebook page for updates and please do circulate announcements widely.
Hoping to hear from you soon!
Your workshop co-chairs,
Kelsey Leonard and Pier Luigi Buttigieg
Strategic and Implementation Plans
Over the last six months the OBPS has been working on a strategic plan and an implementation plan which has now been approved by our co-sponsors IODE and GOOS. These plans are built on community input and support the OBPS vision and mission. This 5-year strategic plan is consistent with a decadal vision and includes priorities for the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. It covers the needs related to both the operations of the Ocean Best Practices System and the utility of the OBP process for the large and diverse representatives of the broad ocean observing community, which includes observers, data managers, modelers, and end users and their applications. Four strategic objectives have been defined:
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Strategic Objective 01: To secure the OBPS as a trusted system through which the ocean community persistently archives and converges their methods, standards, guides, and other methodological content into context-sensitive best practices.
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Strategic Objective 02: To accelerate the interoperability of observations, convergence of methodologies, and conventions across ocean communities into trusted, transparently-developed, context-sensitive and interoperable best practices and standards.
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Strategic Objective 03: To foster community - led and equitable capacity development in ocean best practices.
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Strategic Objective 04: To facilitate the creation of a federated network of interoperating ocean practices systems across all rights-holders and stakeholders.
Read the full Strategic Plan and Implementation Plan.
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Digital Standards for eDNA/omics: Ensuring harmonised (meta)data standards across communities
Many grass-roots standards are emerging as biodiversity assessment using eDNA/omics rapidly gains popularity. Those that aim at having long-term relevance, typically incorporate their outcomes into prevailing, global standards in the domain. However, those prevailing standards must - themselves - begin to converge, or at least interoperate, such that users and co-developers do not have to choose between them. When using one, (meta)data should be readily and automatically translated to the other. This requires a technical solution but also a lasting agreement between standards groups.
To address these issues, OBPS Steering Group member Pier Luigi Buttigieg and OBPS eDNA/Omics Task Team co-founder, Raïssa Meyer, convened a joint Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) and Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) working group to bridge the popular DarwinCore (DwC) and Minimal Information about any (x) Sequence (MIxS) metadata standard specifications.
In its final phases, the group has worked with representatives of both the GSC and TDWG, as well as key implementers such as the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS) and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Its outcomes are socio-technological, providing
- Machine-readable and validated interoperability mappings, reference implementations of a curated MIxS extension to DwC, and
- Recommendations for maintaining interoperability as part of a joint GSC/TDWG standards development process, building on existing links in the Genomic Biodiversity Working Group (GBWG).
The report, recommendations, mapping, and reference implementations developed by this working group will soon be cross-archived in the OBPS. More information may be found here.
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Mark Bushnell
I took this photo in 1996 with a drugstore waterproof camera that actually used film. For whatever reason, I was not in a good mood and needed to get out of the office. I'd been wishing for a good photo of a drifting buoy with the newly developed barometer mast. It was a warm, sunny, calm day so I grabbed a buoy and headed off by myself on my 34' sailboat. I didn't ask for permission and didn't tell anyone what I was up to - I just took off. Once in the middle of Biscayne Bay, I threw the buoy in and jumped in after it. I shot the whole roll of film, 24 frames, from different angles and from above and below the surface. This one had just the right sun glint and looked the best. To this day, I wonder if I was working or playing? That's when you know you have the right job!
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Robot Fish
Serenity Pearlman, Age 11
PLOCAN is a research center that makes tools to measure the ocean, and this recent blog talks about visiting their drones and gliders, things like cool robot torpedoes that cross the sea, or surfboards that wiggle from island to island all by themselves. These robots are covered with all kinds of measurement tools which talk to their computers through satellites. And then the researchers set them free to explore the ocean to track and learn all by themselves. Be free, tiny robot boat, be free!!! See you in a few months. What a cool world we live in.
Learn more about PLOCAN and Serenity’s perceptions of ocean observations in her full blog here
Eric Delory shows Serenity a modern small Hydrophone
Piloting Bio-GO-SHIP
Over the next two years, a team of researchers will incorporate biological measurements on three U.S. GO-SHIP hydrographic cruises in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans using established methodologies, novel techniques, and cross-disciplinary ocean observations as recommended by SCOR WG154 to assess marine ecosystem health and the influence of changing ocean dynamics on plankton. This project will quantify the molecular diversity, size spectrum, chemical composition, and abundances of plankton communities across large spatial, vertical, and eventually temporal scales through systematic, high quality, and calibrated sampling of genomics, transcriptomics, plankton imaging and cytometry, pigments (in situ and also used for calibration/validation of ocean color satellite sensors), particle chemistry, and optical techniques as operational oceanographic tools. Read more about the Bio-GO-SHIP project here.
Interoperability and Best Practices in Taxonomy
The Phytoplankton Taxonomy Working Group of the Ocean Carbon and Biogeochemistry program is developing suggestions and recommendations on data standards and practices for taxon-resolved phytoplankton observations. This includes suggestions to incorporate metadata tags and data fields in SeaBASS data records that are interoperable with DarwinCore.
Deep-Ocean Exploration Variables
A new report from NOAA provides the results of a multiyear project to identify deep-ocean exploration variables and evaluate how NOAA Ocean Exploration (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Office of Ocean Exploration and Research), addresses high-priority exploration variables through its current ocean exploration operations. NOAA Ocean Exploration is the only federal program dedicated to ocean exploration. Through its exploration activities and unique capabilities, NOAA Ocean Exploration reduces unknowns and scientific gaps in deep-ocean areas (greater than 200 m water depth) and provides high-value environmental intelligence required.
The working group identified 91 exploration variables through a literature review of 12 deep-sea publications and reports that synthesize discussions and workshops related to exploration data. Of those 91, 33 exploration variables were identified in three or more reports. Ultimately, the working group deemed 16 exploration variables as high priority. Read the full report here.
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Epeli Hau’ofa, excerpt from Our Sea of Islands
But we all know that only those who make the ocean their home and love it, can really claim it as their own.
Conquerors come, conquerors go, the ocean remains, mother only to her children.
This mother has a big heart though; she adopts anyone who loves her.
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OceanGliders Best Practice Workshop
The OceanGliders Best Practice virtual workshop was held between May 11 and 25, 2021 and supported by H2020 EuroSea and GROOM II projects and embedded into the global OceanGliders observing network. The aim of the workshop was to converge on practices around all glider activities such as preparation, deployment, data management, sensor calibration, and data processing and create a comprehensive set of Best Practices. This collective effort will ensure that the valuable data acquired by gliders around the globe will be inter-comparable with other data and accessible to all data users to better understand, predict and make sustainable use of our ocean. In total more than 150 glider experts from around the globe participated in the workshop.
The workshop goals were to:
- Reinforce the OceanGliders.org community;
- Prepare an overview document that outlines the needs and strategy “Towards OceanGliders Best Practices and Standards”
- Develop EOV-based Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).
The workshop consisted of three plenaries spanning two weeks and many working group meetings in the interim. The different working groups that formed around SOPs made substantial progress in moving toward a consensus on methods for different sensor types, data management and operations. These working groups will finish their writing tasks over the next months aiming to publish different documents (i.e. the Community Overview paper and multiple SOPs etc) after rigorous community review towards the end of 2021. The documents will be fed into the OPBS repository.
The meeting was set up following Best Practices on Virtual Meetings, developed by the virtual communication & e-learning communities over the past decade. Namely, we aimed to have a maximum of a few short sessions per day accommodating different time zones to support global participation, combined with asynchronous working sessions at our own pace in between. A couple of synchronous workshop sessions were primarily used for discussion and only very few introductory presentations were scheduled. Additionally multiple networking modes were offered: (1) Ice-Breaker event, (2) random small breakout groups during the plenaries, (3) networking rooms for personal one-to-one discussions. Many new research labs including technical personnel and students, which typically could not participate due to funding limitations, contributed to this inclusive low-carbon workshop. For further information please contact Soeren Thomsen.
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