Progress report for
Establish the Local Environmental Observer (LEO) Network in all oceans and along all of the world's coastlines within 5 years
Achievement at a glance
The LEO Network platform is fully functional and can be explored at www.leonetwork.org. On the date of this progress report, there were 2,772 registered LEO Network members affiliated with over 1000 organizations in 651 communities around the world (see the figure provided). However, the commitment of implementing the LEO Network in all oceans and along all the world's coastlines, in the form of LEO Oceans, is stalled due to lack of identified funding. Although the LEO Network platform can be considered fully developed, additional modifications would advance the platform for application to ocean and coastal social-ecological systems and it would support implementation and adoption along the world's coastlines. Advancements would include interfacing and integration with other citizen-science platforms, such as through Earth Challenge 2020; advancing crowd-based peer review, refinement, and verification of LEO posts and data; geocoding of scientific peer-reviewed literature on topics relevant to local and regional observations, and the activation of that data layer as like LEO’s existing news articles layer. These advancements will increase the integration of knowledge dimensions related to global environmental change, and they will enable global scaling of LEO. In addition to the role of the LEO Network in documenting communicating local, regional, and global environmental change, we are looking to develop the solutions aspect of the network, enabling more seamless connection with libraries of adaptation solutions relevant to local and regional observations of change.Challenges faced in implementation
Funding for implementing LEO Oceans is the only limiting factor to achieving this commitment. We believe this project, and the LEO Network and platform, to be a compelling opportunity for funders who would achieve considerable benefits from supporting this initiative. This is a turn-key project, and an extremely efficient use of funding. Partners with in-kind support are also welcome, especially organizations with missions and capacity to implement this local observation surveillance system globally.Next Steps
The most important next step for this commitment to succeed is to secure funding. The LEO Network is currently supported only for implementation in Alaska and British Columbia. At the very least, basic programmatic support is needed to begin scaling the system to the world’s oceans and coastlines. Support of at least some of the aforementioned advancements in the LEO platform will be integral to this scaling and ocean application.Beneficiaries
The beneficiaries of this project are all citizens of the world, but particularly those with the strongest connections to coastlines and oceans. The LEO Network was built by and for Indigenous communities, and so it is designed to benefit these or other remote or localized communities, but LEO is available for everyone's use, and it is also designed to help integrate different knowledge dimensions for understanding local, regional, and global environmental and ecological changes.