Progress report for
OCEAN DATA FOR OCEAN STEWARDSHIP
Achievement at a glance
Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) continues to increase its ocean monitoring capacity in the Northeast Pacific, Arctic and Atlantic and continues to collect long-term time series of essential oceanographic variables. Since the voluntary commitment was registered, the number of data products has increased from 175 to over 225. As a result, ONC continues to make progress towards delivering high quality data products that are being used to inform decision-making in Canada and globally. These data products have been useful for knowledge dissemination through scientific publications, conference papers and graduate theses at both Masters and PhD levels. As of January 2020, ONC operates ~13000 sensors in a diverse range of ecosystems and habitats from coastal waters to the deep ocean (down to 2600m), collecting a number of essential, secondary and tertiary oceanographic (biological, chemical and physical) and geophysical variables in real time. Furthermore, ONC has increased the number of Community Observatories (cabled coastal platforms) and Community Fishers programs (collecting water property data with mobile sensors) as a result of an ongoing effort to engage and support Indigenous and coastal communities in ocean monitoring in their coastal waters. Community observatories are seafloor instrument platforms that continuously collect data to help Indigenous communities complement their traditional knowledge of the ocean with scientific data. These have been installed in communities in Canadas Arctic (Cambridge Bay), and along the coast of British Columbia. The Community Fishers program provides coastal communities with a Conductivity-Temperature-Depth (CTD) instrument to collect vertical profiles of oceanographic variables at multiple sampling sites. This enables a larger spatial scale ocean monitoring compared to community observatories.Challenges faced in implementation
Given the high number of sensors and their high sampling frequencies, the volume of data collected is extremely large, while formats vary from scalar data to hydrophone and video recordings. As a result, maintaining high quality data standards and detailed metadata for all of our products is a continuous challenge. Another challenge has been to design effective tools for data access for a broad range of users and multiple data types. Over the last year, ONC, with input from its community partners, has developed a user-friendly data portal where data can be easily previewed, plotted and downloaded. Instrument deployment and maintenance is a third constant challenge faced by the organization. All deep-sea sensors must be deployed with help of a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) during ship expeditions while coastal sensors are maintained by smaller vessels or commercial divers. These operations are limited by weather and equipment availability; for example, strong currents and high swell can interrupt operations.Beneficiaries
There are multiple beneficiaries from this commitment, including researchers, students, educators, citizen scientists, decision-makers and local communities. These users are supported by freely available data through the Oceans 2.0 data portal which has been accessed by users from 143 different countries. Scientists benefit from ONCs expanding network and data archives by interpreting and disseminating knowledge through scientific presentations and publications. As a result, decision-makers have access to high quality data to implement evidence-based local, regional and national policies for ocean stewardship. Educators (K -12 and post-secondary) and students benefit from the data product and sensor deployment increase since some of these data have been built into data packages, lessons and laboratory material for teaching purposes and to meet specific learning outcomes. Citizen scientists benefit by searching amongst data products to visualize data and learn about the ocean. Finally, and most importantly, through partnerships, local Indigenous communities are positively benefiting from ONCs community engaged program through Community Observatories and Community Fishers. These communities are closely monitoring how local waters are changing and thus can create detailed mitigation plans to keep their communities safe and adjust resource exploitation as necessary. ONC supports knowledge exchange and collaboration between all of these diverse user groups.