Editor's Note

This month’s Newsletter invites you to look at the background of the OBPS - such an amazing growing resource for the ocean science community, and to learn about the endorsement of the Ocean Practices for the Decade and its 5 high level objectives.
 
There are many interesting news, calls, and coming events for this month. September will surely keep you busy. Please do not forget to fill up the HF Radar Best Practices questionnaire if relevant to you and look at the meeting summary of this month from one of the virtual session of the UN Decade Ocean Tropical Americas Workshops series. Some other News let you further learn about ‘decision trees’ for building ocean sciences best practices, which are used in various disciplines, including business and management, and helps decision making and problem solving. Decision trees for ocean best practices allow adaptability in protocols and methods and identify alternatives that could be the ‘best practice’ for a particular environment or application.
 

~ Virginie van Dongen-Vogels

Our Organization -  like Topsy we ‘grow’d’

Our starting point was working toward a vision of improving the creation, adoption,  and access to ocean best practices, and, a way to maintain and safeguard this knowledge for the future. We needed a repository where people could access the “know how” to guide them in the acquisition of ocean observations, and that provides incentives to document and improve best practices. Under the spell of Paris, in 2017, we came together as a Best Practices Working Group to make the Ocean Best Practices System (OBPS) a reality, with the support of the Atlantos Project, ODIP and OceanObs RCN projects.

Building on the IODE Ocean Data Practices and creating a separate extended search capability, the Ocean Best Practice System (OBPS) became a project co-sponsored by the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) and the International Ocean Data and Information Exchange (IODE) in July 2019.  A governance structure was needed when we moved to an operational system, and the Steering Group (SG) was established. This SG is composed of volunteers from around the World who meet virtually monthly, and in person once a year to guide the operations and evolution of OBPS. The project work is organized through eight Work Packages (WP):

1. Project management,

2. Operations,

3. Advanced technologies and interoperability,

4. Publications, reviews, and endorsement processes,

5. Communications and outreach,

6. User communities,

7. Training and capacity development, and the new

8. OBPS Decade Coordination.

You can find more details of the SG and WPs on our webpage (please scroll the whole page).

Significant dedicated work from our volunteer SG has allowed us to continue to grow. SG members lead or participate in the Work Packages and within these Work Packages, Task Teams are formed with broader community participation to engage members of the ocean community. Each Task Team has a specific mission (for example, one for Best Practices Value Chains or one on Diversity Equity and Inclusivity).  We have received support and feedback from our stakeholder community who understand that our vision ‘To have agreed and broadly adopted methods across ocean research, operations and applications’ is a rallying call for all in the ocean research, applications and data management communities; to work toward making our diverse methodologies more comparable and interoperable, expanding global participation.

OBPS is helping to tackle issues that are not easily solved as we look for global adoption of practices, interoperability, adaptation of practices to regional needs, and expanded capacity development. This is a collaborative effort among all stakeholders in ocean research and applications, and their participation and support are crucial if we are to fulfil our vision.

"Ocean Practices for the Decade" endorsed

The OBPS-SG is pleased to announce the "Ocean Practices for the Decade“ Programme has been endorsed by the UN as an official program (UN#5). OceanPractices (in short) will be around during the entire UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development to help coordinating activities related to Best Practices – their creation, access, dissemination and capacity development. As part of OBPS (Work Package 8), and in coordination with existing and new partners and the UN Decades Actions, OceanPractices will address 5 high level objectives:

1. Enable the development, adoption, and continuous evolution of context-sensitive methodologies and best practices related to ocean research, operations and applications to support the UN Ocean Decade objectives and goals; 
2. Accelerate the co-development and convergence of methodologies across ocean communities into community-accepted, trusted and interoperable best practices and standards; 
3. Sustain a trusted and FAIR- and CARE-compliant system through which the ocean community permanently archives and accesses its methods, standards, guidelines and other methodological content; 
4. Facilitate the creation of a federated network of complementary and seamlessly interoperable methodology management systems (MMS), bringing together UN IGOs, non-UN IGOs, NGOs, regional and global programmes, projects and the private sector; 
5. Foster community-led capacity development in ocean best practices to enable equitable access to information, technology and knowledge and facilitate more ocean science that is fit for purpose

We look forward to working with you - for further information please contact: decade@oceanbestpractices.org

Calling out to the HF Radar community to help identify best practices for GOOS endorsement

Best Practices have always been an essential component across all areas of the observing system and the GOOS OCG ocean observing networks are committed to ensuring that their best practices are comprehensive, findable, and are used. The OCG, IOC, and WMO Integrated Global Observing Systems (WIGOS) are seeking increased collaboration with partner organizations towards the objective of harmonized standards and better traceability of observations to standards. In an ongoing effort to ensure this, the Global HF Radar network is working at providing best practices for the life cycle of all EOVs observed under the program, for each stage of the observation life cycle. The Global HF Radar network is contributing to this effort by compiling this list of best practice documents available and will identify gaps in the documentation and where documents need to be updated.

Best Practices are defined as a methodology that has repeatedly produced superior results relative to other methodologies with the same objective; to be fully elevated to a best practice, a promising method will have been adopted and employed by multiple organizations (Pearlman et al, 2019). Those best practices that have undergone community review and the fully supported network by the HF Radar community will be identified as HF Radar ‘GOOS endorsed’ and tagged as such in the IODE/GOOS OBP's Repository.

As such, we would like to reach out to the community to ensure that the most utilised best practices are endorsed. For this, we invite you to provide your input and fill up the HF Radar Best Practices questionnaire. 
In this questionnaire, some of the reference documents have been organised into the below categories. If you have an additional reference document that details best practices (e.g. operating procedures or realizable references), please add to the appropriate category in the comments section.

• Hardware & Setup
• Quality Assurance/Quality Control
• Metadata and Documentation
• Observation and Analysis Software

Decision trees for Ocean Best Practices

Jay Pearlman

We have been asked how to choose between different practices when designing and implementing a mission. It was recommended that we help users navigate the landscape of Protocols and Best Practices by offering a decision tree that will guide them to a collection of the most relevant resources for their research. So, what is a decision tree?

A decision tree is a flowchart-like structure in which each internal node (branching point) represents a decision on an attribute and each branch represents an outcome of the decision. Successive decisions then follow the outcome of earlier branching points. The most suggested branching points could include Resource and equipment availability, assumptions of algorithms/analysis, data type, and experience level of the user. Such a decision tree could also flag when a decision will reduce the usability of the sample along the line (e.g., using a certain preservative may not allow ... ), and flag ethical concerns. 

As a first step in this direction, the OBPS will be working with the Observing Air-Sea Interactions Strategy (OASIS) UN Decade Programme to implement a decision tree for different surface radiation applications that provide recommendations for (a) choice of sensors, (b) best practices for handling of sensors and installation setup, (c) best practices for calibrating sensors and processing/post-processing data, and (d) sanity checks and tests for goodness of data. We believe this approach is quite broad and will keep you informed.

For this work, we appreciate the collaboration with the co-organizers of the Surface Radiation Community Consultation Working Group, Laura Riihimaki, Alcide Giorgio di Sarra, R. Venkatesan, and Cheng Xue, and with Meghan Cronin, co-chair of the OASIS Programme. Please check The OASIS and the OBPS Surface Radiation Best Practice Workshop for more information.

Meet the ECOP Programme Coordinator for the Ocean Decade

On the last week of August 2021, we established the first steps in the collaboration with the UN Ocean Decade Early Career Ocean Professionals (ECOP) Programme. This will be a long-term effort and we would like to introduce here Evgeniia Kostianaia, the new ECOP coordinator. We look forward to a fruitful collaboration and Ocean Decade together!

Call for Best of the 'bad' Practices stories

Not only best practices are worth sharing, and ‘bad’ practices can be as important to share. While it feels easier to share our success than our failure, we often learn more from our mistakes (and those of others) than our success. As such, keeping a record of 'bad' practices with their reasons of occurrences could be more than half way to get new solutions and may help moving forward from a 'bad' situation. 

At the OBPS workshop last year, we had an impromptu session. We started joking about the need for a repository of worst practices. Lesson learned the hard way. After a good laugh, we moved on to other subjects. But the seed was planted. Should we be documenting bad practices? 

Sometimes you can learn as much from a “I will never do that again” experience as you learn from a documented best practice. So, I asked around. As for answers, a couple of examples are here below.

- 'Sharing data that you have access to but don't actually have permission to distribute....' I did that once and boy did I learn my lesson.”
- 'I don’t need a check list. Well maybe, I do'.... 'The mission went as planned except I didn’t turn on the sensors.'

Each of us has a story, surely we are all human. Shall we share them so others don’t reinvent the wheel? Of course, the author will be called anonymous. 

Please do not hesitate to send a short note on your 'Best of the bad Practices' you have experienced to newsletter@oceanbestpractices.org

• An Ocean of Values: Evolving and Sustaining Ocean Best Practices Workshop V, 20-24 Sept 2021, virtual
• EMSO Time Series conference: ‘Observing Ocean Sound’, 20-22 October 2021, Canary Islands Spain
• International Ocean Data Conference, 14-16 February, virtual and Sopot Poland
• Ocean Sciences Meeting 2022, 27 Feb - 4 Mar 2022, Honulu, HI (USA), hybrid
• International Indian Ocean Science Conference, 14-18 March, Goa India