Editor's Note
Welcome to our April's News Flash!
OBPS is announcing its 6th OBPS Workshop for October 2022 and a new Member of its Steering Group. OBPS is also working with developing regions and the Arctic region, and has been present at the Ocean Science Meeting - OSM2022. There is certainly a growing interest from the science community for the Repository, with more new best practices for XBT and Ocean Gliders released.
There's lots of other news and events to check out in this issue to keep you and your agenda busy over the next couple of months.
~ Virginie van Dongen-Vogels
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Announcing the 6th OBPS Workshop
The Ocean Practices: OBPS Workshop VI will take place VIRTUALLY with Plenaries on 5, 6, and 19 October 2022 (each three hours long). Working Group sessions will meet in between, at times of their own choosing.
The Workshop will cover a broad range of topics proposed/selected by proposed session leads and the workshop coordinators. For the Plenaries, there are two general themes:
1) Guiding technology evolution and use
2) Capacity development/sharing, with an emphasis on developing countries.
Let us know if you are interested in participating, or in proposing a theme or session for a Working Group, by filling out the Interest to Participate short form.
We expect that the outcome of Working Group sessions proposed by community leaders (you) will be particular plans, model methods, and implementation strategies with timelines and leaders that will make these a reality over the short term.
Please check our webpage for more details as they develop.
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Welcoming OceanPredict
You have heard us talk about the “value chain”. This is sequence from observations to data to modeling and applications. The OBPS has long recognized the importance of data assimilation and modeling in the value chain. Recently, OceanPredict expressed interest in best practices and a possible collaboration with OBPS. Working with Kirsten Wilmer-Becker and EuroSea, we will be participating in the EuroSea/OceanPredict workshop on Ocean Prediction and Observing System Design that will take place at the Met Office (Exeter, UK) from 29 June to 1 July 2022.
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Welcome new OBPS member
The OBPS welcomes a new member of its Steering Group. Rebecca Zitoun is co-chair of the Capacity Development working group joining Ana Lara-Lopez in guiding our growing capacity development activities.
 Rebecca currently works as a Postdoctoral Researcher at GEOMAR in the field of Trace Metal Biogeochemistry, Toxicology, and Environmental Chemistry. She investigates the principles and processes underlying trace metal speciation in marine ecosystems in an effort to advance current understanding of trace metal biogeochemistry, refine aquatic biogeochemical models, and improve environmental risk assessments and management strategies for bioactive metals. She is also interested in marine-related topics including ocean acidification and deep-sea mining. Further, she has consulted for the International Atomic Energy Agency on capacity building efforts in Small Island Developing States under the umbrella of SDG14, focusing on microplastic and trace metal chemistry. She is a member of the Ocean Literacy Task Team of the Early Career Ocean Professional (ECOPS) of the UN Ocean Decade. She participates in national and international conferences, writes newsletter articles, engage in outreach programs, and transfer her expertise and knowledge to students at all stages of their education through seminars and student supervision to facilitate the training of the next generation of expert scientists and inform the wider public. Please welcome Rebecca to OBPS when you meet her.
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From the Repository - OBPS by the numbers
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Cristian Munoz Mas, Pauline Simpson and Jay Pearlman
OBPS has reached 1572 documents uploaded into the Repository. Thanks to the continuous effort provided by our Repository curator and the support of the whole OBPS community, we have multiplied the contents by 4 during the last 3 years (Fig 1).
Fig 1: Monthly accumulated uploads of documents (blue). 6 months average trend (red).
A more detailed analysis of our repository database reveals that 62% of our content is clearly dominated by physical, chemical, and biological oceanography (Fig 2a).
The analysis also shows that 32% of the documents are considered best practices (Fig 2b) by their creators. Only 5% are considered standards, and the other 63% are manuals, guidelines, standard operating procedures, and educational materials.
16% of our documents contain metadata about the level of adoption of such methodologies, with 41% of them already adopted by multiple organizations, followed by a 21% of adoption at an international level, and 12% adopted at a national level (Fig 2c).
Fig 2: (a) disciplines balance. (b) methodology types. (c ) methodology adoption types
The results of this exploration indicate that an effort in raising the diversity of disciplines of methodologies submitted is required (with particular emphasis in fisheries, atmosphere, geological oceanography, environment, and human activities). In addition, even though only 32% are considered as best practices, there is a big potential for elevating a significant number of the current methodologies into best practices due to the high level of adoption of these methods by multiple organizations or at a national and international level.
OBPS is developing a Metrics dashboard that will be provided here.
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OceanGliders Best Practices are online!
Soeren Thomsen & Johannes Karstensen
The OceanGliders community achieved significant accomplishments related to developing best practices as a joint effort of EuroSea, the EuroGOOS Glider Task Team and H2020 GROOM II. Since the first global OceanGliders best practice workshop in May 2021, the glider community drafted various documents, i.e. Standard Operating Procedures SOPs for Salinity, Oxygen, Nitrate and Depth Average Currents.
Key challenges related to best practice documents are making them easily updatable and having a flexible governance structure in place. Thus, in September 2021, OceanGliders moved to GitHub to organize the writing of the open-access community documents inclusively and transparently. The online community has attracted 107 members so far. Various GitHub training sessions have been provided to the OceanGliders Community members to support the new asynchronous working mode on GitHub. The Oxygen SOP is the most advanced and is preparing for version 1.0 to be submitted to the OBPS repository. All SOPs will be submitted to the OBPS repository after an open community review on GitHub. Peer-reviewed publications that summarized the SOPs content are planned to be submitted.
Everyone is welcome to join this community effort i.e. by providing feedback via comments just below the online documents or introducing themselves here
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Newly endorsed XBT Best Practices for Quality Assurance
Juliet Hermes
After much work and coordination and a full community review, a team led by Justine Park have created an XBT (Expendable Bathy Thermographs) Operational Best Practices for Quality Assurance which has been endorsed by the GOOS Observation Coordination Group – Ship Observations Team panel of experts as a globally accepted best practice for the Ship of Opportunity Programme.
XBT temperature measurements monitor changes of ocean temperature from sub-mesoscale to global scales, deriving key surface and subsurface currents to study meridional heat transport in all ocean basins and supplement other observational platforms to assess the variability of the upper ocean heat content. The XBT measurement system in its simplest form is compact, inexpensive, robust, reliable, and easy to operate.
The low cost of making many closely spaced temperature measurements is the key reason for implementing this surveying technique. Costs can be further minimized by recruiting volunteer ship platforms and employing personnel already working aboard as operators.
The document aims to improve the quality assurance of XBT data by establishing best practices for field measurements and promoting their adoption by the global operational and scientific community.
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Best Practices in Developing Regions (Part I)
Rachel Przeslawski
At their March meeting, the OBPS Steering Group was treated to a trio of presentations by leaders in best practices in developing regions:
- Tommy Bornman (South African Environmental Observation Network) spoke about OBPS in Africa and how best practices are created by the community for the community. He used a series of maps showing the locations of various ocean observing infrastructure and coastal activities which at first glance seems to show relatively limited capabilities around Africa, but ultimately revealed growth, expertise, and will.
- Ana Carolina de Azevedo Mazzuco (OBIS Brazil) discussed perspectives and challenges of using ocean best practices in Brazil. She emphasised the long coastline and vast marine estate of Brazil which presents unique challenges, including varying needs and resources among different regions. She described successful programs including the Pesquisas Ecologicas de Longa Duracao (long-term ecological research program) which is the main source of ocean best practices in the region.
- Jerome Aucan (Pacific Community) spoke about issues in the Pacific region, including similar challenges faced by Africa and Brazil but also additional challenges stemming from travel within the Pacific region (e.g. between islands). The Pacific islands’ small population makes it difficult to find skilled technicians, and regional collaboration is therefore essential.
There were a few common recommendations to increase the development and uptake of fit-for-purpose best practices in developing countries:
- Plan actions using resources from the Ocean Best Practices System;
- Simplify methods, including finding alternatives for expensive or otherwise prohibitive equipment and techniques;
- Focus on the objectives;
- Establish observing systems and BPs with a bottom-up approach (i.e. avoid parachute science)
- Diversify funding.
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Shared Arctic Variables, including multicultural and social aspects
Jay Pearlman
The last week of March was the Arctic Observing Summit in Tromso Norway. The event addressed many of the issues of observing and the inclusion of Indigenous Populations in the creation and use of Arctic data and information. Members of the OBPS team participated in discussions of Shared Arctic Variables (SAV) and the related methods for observing and characterizing them. But what is an SAV? SAVs are broader than essential ocean variables as they include multicultural and social aspects of Arctic stakeholders and Rights Holders. An outcome of the meeting was the recognition that both data and the methods used for observation and data processing should be elements of SAVs, focused on understanding the rapidly changing conditions as well as the diverse cultural aspects of the northern polar environment.
For more information, refer to an invited paper on practices in the Arctic by Pearlman et al., “The Arctic Practices System - Use and Benefits of Arctic Practices in Observing, Data Management and Applications.”
Photo Credit: Maia Hoeberects
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CoreTrustSeal Survey
The CoreTrustSeal Board is seeking input for proposed changes to the requirements to take effect for 2023-2025. We value our community members opinions and feel the process of updating these trustworthy data repository requirements will be most successful with as much community participation as possible.
Our community is built around a Peer-to-Peer review process. We help each other protect our data assets for future generations by challenging each other to be the best repositories we can be. We all know that the ever-changing landscape we work in requires periodic review of our requirements and procedures.
The CoreTrustSeal Board appreciates your time and effort in completing this survey by the 15th April 2022, and providing valuable feedback on the CoreTrustSeal Requirements. While we do not have the resources to respond to each survey individually, be assured, we value each community member’s input. We will make every effort to reflect them in the revisions of the Requirements and we will share progress and outcomes in the coming months.
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Biological Observation Data Standardization
There is a new product from the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Biological Data Standards Cluster titled Biological Observation Data Standardization: A Primer for Data Managers. The purpose of this primer is to share what data standards exist and how they can be used to make biological data more closely aligned with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, & Reusable) principles. More information about the cluster and primer development can be found in our recent blog post.
Further details can be found here.
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The Marine Biodiversity Networking Fridays
On the 12th of November 2021, the first series of the Marine Biodiversity Networking Fridays was launched resulting from a collaboration between the Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (MBON) and the Atlantic International Research (AIR) Centre, Sessions on marine biodiversity occur every second Friday of the month, with the next one planned on the 8th April on IOC/WESTPAC and coral reef survey and recovery activities.
Those netfridays have recently been endorsed as UN Ocean Decade activity and can be followed at any stage.
Please refer to the Marine Biodiversity Observation Network for more news.
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Connecting ECOPs with Academia, Industry and Best Practices
Hari Vishnu and Venugopalan Pallayil
The IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society (OES) organized a Town Hall at the Ocean Sciences meeting 2022. The event, “TH04: Connecting Early Career Ocean Professionals with Academia, Industry, Philanthropy and Technical societies” was held on 25 Feb 2022 with the aim to enable interaction between early career ocean professionals (ECOPs) and leading researchers, academics, engineers and industry experts who are solution-providers. This Town Hall stemmed from the idea that one of the key things we want to achieve in the ongoing UN Decade of Ocean Sciences is more coordination and communication between ECOPs and the experienced practitioners of Ocean knowledge. ECOPs are going to take over and continue this movement beyond the span of this 10 years, and to keep the momentum going, more ECOPs need to be inspired to join this movement and take up or continue careers in Ocean science and related fields.
The event started off with a pre-event survey, followed by an introduction by the moderators Dr. Hari Vishnu, Chief Editor of IEEE OES Earthzine magazine and an ECOP with OES, and Dr. Venugopalan Pallayil, the vice-president of technical activities at OES. The moderators introduced IEEE OES, and its involvement in the Decade and with ECOPs. The 6 panelists were
- Justin Manley, Founder of Just Innovation, Co-founder of Seahawk Robotics.
- Eric Delory, Head, Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands.
- Rich Patterson, Director of Sales at Kongsberg Maritime.
- Evgeniia Kostiania, Ocean Decade Global ECOP program coordinator & Consultant at IOC-UNESCO.
- Jochen Klinke, Director of Science at Seabird Scientific.
- Virginie Van Dongen-Vogels and Cora Horstmann, ECOPs representative from Ocean Best-practices system
The event was attended by around 67 participants. A pre-event poll survey showed that about 80% of them were ECOPs. The survey also asked the question of “what are the important areas the community needs to tackle to encourage ECOPs to advance their career in Ocean sciences”, and the most overwhelming need highlighted by the audience was that of career opportunities, followed by Funding and Access to Networks/Contacts. The need for training was also highlighted. In line with this, many of the panelists spoke about related topics.
The existing opportunities highlighted were resources for ECOPs to use to further their expertise, to apply for funding or ship time, to participate in competitions, and to get more awareness on Ocean sciences in general, or on the ECOP program for spreading word on the Decade. Ocean Best Practices representatives highlighted the importance of creating and observing best practices in Ocean science.
After the talks, the audience engaged with various questions to the panelists. The moderators also posed a few questions, such as what the requirements of industry would be that ECOP training programs could focus on boosting in the coming Decade. Most of the feedback from the industry mentioned the importance of networking skills, and the very different skill-sets required when applying for industry jobs (in contrast to academic job). For example, it requires an applicant to showcase how he/she can practically demonstrate the learned skills in the field. Some audience members asked how they could get involved in the Decade or specific regional nodes, which Evgeniia promptly answered with relevant links to the ECOP program. Panelists listed out internship and research opportunities for ECOPS and graduate students in their organizations and asked interested ECOPS and students to get in touch with them.
Overall, this is one step forward in furthering the dialogue between ECOPs and Ocean professionals, and we hope more such events may be organized with specific focus points in the future.
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Ecstasy by Victor Hugo
I was alone beside the sea, upon a starry night
And not a cloud was in the sky, and not a sail in sight;
Beyond the limits of the world far stretched my raptured eye,
And the forests and the mountains, and nature all around,
Seemed to unite in questioning, in vast and mingled sound,
The billows of the ocean, and the splendor of the sky.
And the golden stars of heaven, in their unnumbered crowd,
With harmonies ten thousand, with voices clear and loud,
Replied, as low they bended down their radiant crowns of flame
And the blue floods that nought has power to govern or arrest,
Replied, as low they bended down, the foam upon their crest—
'The Lord, our great Creator, His glory we proclaim!'
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Please regularly check the Events section of our webpage for updates.
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