Our Ocean in COVID-19: Community Participatory Marine Science

 

Firstly, thank you to all our backers who helped us reach our 10% funding goal within the first week!

The Our Ocean in COVID-19 project is a pilot project on the eOceans platform that aims to quantify the changes being seen in the ocean during the pandemic. We decided to launch this project in April 2020 after seeing the headlines of nature "getting a break" during this time or, in contrast, the discarded PPE ending up in the ocean and photos of people flocking to crowded beaches after initial business closures. Although the full effects of the pandemic, and associated interventions, on marine systems will not be known for many years, management and policy decisions still have to be made in the present . To make informed decisions, we first need to understand socio-ecological change in the ocean during this time.

Understanding current socio-ecological change comes with challenges:

• data collection is resource-intensive and often restricted to trained marine professionals, which limits the total number of observations;

• lack of a standardized tool for collecting and digitizing effort and observations at sea;

• and data are typically siloed and need to be analyzed and interpreted by experts working to answer one question at a time.

COVID-19 has further diminished research both by restricting travel and access to the marine environment and increasing the urgency of data collection and interpretation.

Our solution: a global, collaborative monitoring effort by researches, organizations and everyday ocean goers. This is possible with eOceans.

 

Anybody who lives, works or recreates on or by the ocean can collaborate by logging their at sea activity and human and wildlife observations with the eOceans app (Found on Apple and Android). Even if all you see is a clean beach, or an "empty" horizon, that is still valuable data as the absence of activity is just as important as the presence.

Our goal is to span this project across 50 different countries with 100,000 collaborators .So far, we have ~1000 collaborators across 27 different countries . Leading this project at the local and regional level are Principal Investigators (marine science professionals). They are responsible for recruiting and working with their community to document ocean activity and observations, which are processed, analyzed, visualized, and displayed by eOceans. PIs then interpret and communicate results between communities and the global team. We also work with Ocean Partner organizations (NGOs, tourism operators, community groups) who advocate for the project within their networks.

When embarking in participatory community science, it is essential to have engaged and knowledgeable collaborators. That is why we have launched on Experiment, to raise the funds necessary for a crucial component to this project: the eOceans Digital Field Guide.

 

The Field Guide will give collaborators the knowledge and confidence to make accurate observations which will in turn provide high quality data to this and future eOceans studies. The Field Guide will be the world's first global, in-app guide that can adapt to recorded ocean observations and changes, providing real-time insight to the ocean environment. This addition to the eOceans platform will improve data control and assurance, making our results for the Our Ocean in COVID-19 project more reliable and effective.

It has been shown that the more people understand about the ocean, the more they are inclined to want to preserve and protect it (1,2). Our moonshot goal with the Digital Field Guide is to increase global ocean literacy and encourage ocean stewardship.