April News | 🌊eOceans®🪼
New eOceans landing page!
Introducing our beautiful, informative new landing page!
eOceans®, where we handle YOUR data processing, management, analysis, visualizations, reports, and dissemination needs.
It's like having a team of data scientists in your pocket working full-time on your project — saving you up to 80% of your time! —so you can stay focused on what matters.
Check it out: eOceans.app
Power of collaboration!
We're now at 332,000 animals, 25,000 human activities, and 319 species logged. An amazing effort from everyone who got out and logged observations — including zeros — for their own project or for the greater good of the ocean.
A couple of turtle species are making their way up there with the sharks now.
Check out more graphs on The Ocean Ledger™ by eOceans®.
Policy Updates
We've updated our policies at eOceans®. These changes are small but reflect enhancements to our feature list. In our continuous effort to provide you with the best experience, we've incorporated several tweaks and improvements to further streamline your workflow, doing more of the heavy lifting, so you don't have to!
App update: Track
We've refined the way we capture your coordinates while doing moving surveys — like belt transects, aerial transects, roving, and more. While the tracks are now more accurate, we still made significant efforts not to gobble up your phone's storage, so only grabbing 'zeros' every 60 seconds unless you log something.
News: Heat & Bleaching
Unfortunately, it's not good news.
The ocean is experiencing unprecedented high temperatures. The impacts of this unprecedented global heat event are still unfolding. Coral bleaching is one of the obvious signs of heat stress on animals.
Follow and support the amazing team that is tracking this unfold: MUI—Maldives project
Events
A few upcoming events we're looking forward to presenting at:
April 25 — Pilots and Prototyping in the Oceans. Blue Institute.
May 2 — eOceans: Data analyses need to be real-time. IOI International Ocean Institute (IOI)
May 9 — Marine Protected Areas and mobile megafauna. IMarEST (Institute of Marine Engineering, Science & Technology). ANYONE CAN ATTEND THIS, SO MARK YOUR CALENDAR!
*Are you looking for an expert panelist, reviewer, examiner, or presenter to evaluate or advise your program? Topics may include Science, Oceans, Blue Economy, Ocean Tech, Marine Conservation, Sharks, Citizen Science, Ocean Pollution, and more. Get in touch with us (science@eOceans.co).
Blue Economy Tracker™
We are reinvigorated to push forward with the Blue Economy Tracker™ after attending a "Blue Economy" conference. There was a lack of understanding of the intention of the Blue Economy, how it differs from the Ocean Economy and Green Economy, and how it can help build stronger economies while rebuilding ocean health in an equitable way.
Our aim with the Blue Economy Tracker™ is to help decision makers — innovators, businesses, investors, policy makers, and communities — make smart decisions for the ocean and everything that depends on it.
We've got a great team working on this, and it's nearly there! Stay tuned.
Book a demo
If you've got a project that needs timely analysis, send us a message to book a demo at science@eoceans.co
Thank you!
Thank you for joining us on this journey of tracking our ocean, collaboratively, transparently, in real-time.
California: Tracking MPAs in real-time
Make a difference for the ocean with the eOceans app. 📸©eOceans
A comprehensive network of marine protected areas and reserves (MPAs) has been established in California to safeguard marine ecosystems, which are vital for the well-being and resilience of coastal communities. However, one impact-driven, forward-thinking community has gone above and beyond to actually track the performance of their protected area in real-time. Today, we're shining a Spotlight on this community to inspire others about what's possible.
Spotlight Project
In 2023, Ocean Science Analytics (OSA), a pioneering research and education company based in California, USA, launched its Marine Protected Area (MPA) Observer Program, powered by the eOceans platform.
With a small, dedicated team of local observers, OSA embarked on a mission to unite local experts to describe and track the performance of their protected off the coast of La Jolla —inside and adjacent to the Matlahuayl State Marine Reserve and San Diego-Scripps Coastal State Marine Conservation Areas — nearby the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and San Diego, California.
Impact generated by Ocean Science Analytics and their community to assess, track, and improve the performance of their local MPA. 📸©eOceans
Prior to this initiative, only 120 observations were available for this area, covering a 40 year period, in the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS), the global open-access data and information clearing-house on marine biodiversity.
Today, however, thanks to the dedication of local expert observers like Darren (featured in our Spotlight Member section), the team now surpasses that number in just one day. They aren't merely tracking the area's biodiversity, but also its activities, social value, and potential threats.
United by their shared commitment, this team doesn't only monitor the MPA's performance over time; they are working together to understand its success and are empowered to identify, communicate, and mitigate evolving threats, ensuring the marine area continues to thrive and provide for generations to come.
Spotlight Member
The impact generated by an expert observer, Darren, who is applying his expertise to track and support the success of his local MPA for his enjoyment and that of future generations. 📸©eOceans
Gray whales, orcas, sea lions, cormorants, lobsters, giant sea stars, boats, divers, SUPs, surfers, ghost nets, and more — Darren, a recreational and commercial scuba diver in California, logs highly detailed observations that offer invaluable insights about the areas inside and adjacent to the Matlahuayl State Marine Reserve and San Diego-Scripps Coastal State Marine Conservation Areas. As a valued member of the OSA project (above), Darren contributes his expertise to help track the health of this important area.
You can follow Darren in the eOceans app to learn more about what’s happening in his part of the ocean and discover more about how to log, working your way up to becoming an expert "Orca" observer.
Spread the Word!
Download this poster, and others via download folder to help spread the word!
Marine Fauna diversity poster to share on boats, shops, community bulletin boards, etc. 📸©eOceans
We’d love to have you join our global community of ocean explorers tracking the ocean in real-time:
Join eOceans on your mobile device (iOS, Android) or desktop. Use the mobile app to log what you see when you are under, on, or next to the ocean or a connected water body.
If you have found it interesting:
You can subscribe to get notified when I publish a new article, and you can follow or connect with me on LinkedIn. Thanks for your support!
New Study Reveals Urgent Call to Reinvent Shark Conservation
Over the last two decades, sharks have become increasingly emblematic of the world’s most threatened wildlife, drawing heightened attention from the scientific community, regulatory bodies, and advocacy groups. A decade ago, we published a study that found that 100 million sharks are killed each year, prompting calls for enhanced conservation and the establishment of Shark Sanctuaries. However, a new study brings a sobering revelation — the global mortality of sharks has continued to rise, raising concerns about the effectiveness of current conservation measures.
Unfulfilled Promise of Protective Regulations
The study examined shark mortality across time and space, comparing mortality rates to existing conservation regulations. Contrary to expectations, the findings show a harsh reality — instead of declining, shark mortality surged from a minimum of 76 to 80 million between 2012 and 2019. Importantly, approximately 25 million of those dead sharks belonged to a threatened species, like hammerhead sharks, painting a grim picture of the ongoing challenges faced by sharks globally.
Tiger shark in Florida, where it is illegal to possess, kill, sell, or exchange tiger sharks and other species in state waters. 📸 © Christine Ward-Paige
Futile Attempts to Curb Finning
A cornerstone of shark conservation policies has been the prohibition of shark finning, a cruel practice involving the removal of a shark’s fins while it’s alive and discarding the rest of the shark. The intent behind these regulations was to halt this wasteful practice and reduce targeted shark mortality. However, the tenacity of shark finners proved formidable, finding ways to exploit loopholes and evolve in response to policy changes.
As regulations against shark finning were enforced, the industry adapted swiftly. For instance, they started (unbelievably) sewing many shark fins to a single shark body to land the fins ‘attached’. Again forcing policies to evolve quickly to require fins be “naturally attached.” As policies developed, the industry further used non-fishing mother-ships to dispose of shark bodies. The intricate dance between shark finners and anti-shark finning policies showed the lengths the shark finning industry was willing to go to for shark fins.
A Diverse Marketplace: The New Threat Landscape
While anti-finning policies developed, a shift in market demand was pursued across various industries, adding layers of complexity to conservation efforts. As more full sharks were landed, new markets for shark meat and oils emerged, presenting unprecedented challenges.
The diversification in demand amplified the complexity of the conservation landscape, a challenge this new study critically uncovers.
Beacons of Hope: Shark Sanctuaries, CITES Listing, Public Awareness
Despite the apparent ineffectiveness of anti-finning policies, the study indicates that there was an increase in live releases for CITES-listed species, including hammerhead, thresher, and oceanic whitetip sharks across various fisheries areas.
Public awareness campaigns and pressure from large seafood retailers for sustainable seafood products were also considered to be amongst the most effective conservation strategies.
One industry representative noted, “We are seeing a big push from [the] market side, which is having a bigger impact at this stage relative to the regulatory side [because] if you lose your [eco-]certification, it would be diabolical for business and a huge company risk”.
The Urgency of Real-Time Tracking: A Call for Action
As we grapple with the study’s reality, pressing questions emerge.
What has transpired in the five years following the examined data that extends only to 2019? What if this ineffectiveness hadn’t been discovered now, or ever?
Alternatively, where would we be if we had discovered that anti-finning policies weren’t working 15 years ago?
The results of this study provide a critical juncture for reflection today. Without it, we might have continued to believe in the efficacy of anti-finning policies while the global mortality of sharks surged unabated.
Way forward needs to be real-time and automated
This study underscores the urgency and rationale behind the creation of eOceans — a platform designed to perform analyses like those in this study in near real-time, with automated evaluations of fisheries and policies, providing the necessary insights to iterate conservation strategies in a timely, efficient, and effective way.
This real-time approach is crucial to aligning conservation efforts with the dynamic changes in business, society, and our oceans.
To get things moving for sharks and rays in your community, log your observations in the eOceans app and share our posters (below) on boats and bulletin boards.
Shark and ray diversity poster to share with your community. Download this and more information here.
eOceans — For the ocean. For us.
It’s time to unite for the ocean!
We're thrilled to announce the relaunch of eOceans® and we can't wait for you to try it out!
To get started, download the newest version of the mobile app at App Store | Google Play or use the desktop app. (NOTE: Only the mobile app can be used to log ocean observations, including species, humans, pollution, and environment.)
What is eOceans?
eOceans® is much more than an all—in-one app with analyses built-in — it's a community and movement. By recording, sharing, and understanding what’s happening in the ocean, people and communities can finally make smart, timely actions towards a restored ocean with flourishing communities.
Why eOceans?
Our mission is simple: to rebuild past oceans through collaborative, transparent, timely, and accountable actions. This includes fisheries, protected areas, biodiversity, endangered, valued, and invasive species, pollution, social and cultural value, environmental impact assessments, and more.
What's New?
We've rebuilt the eOceans® app and platform from the ground up to make it more reliable, powerful, and impactful.
Here are a few short ‘How-To’ videos to get you started:
1. Choose Your Species List (20 sec)
2. Log Observations (animals, humans, pollution, etc. 1.5 minutes)
3. Track and Grow Your Impact (1 minute)
4. Check on Your Projects (1 minute)
Challenge: Log 30 observations per week in eOceans® app — then see what impact you’ve made.
"Together, we have the power to protect and restore our ocean for a livable future planet!" — Dr. Christine Ward-Paige, eOceans Founder
NEW PROJECT FOR DECEMBER! (Yes, right now)
Modeled after the renowned Christmas Bird Count, instead of birds the "Holiday Ocean Count" focuses on documenting and protecting the social values of our cherished ocean spaces. Our goal is to repeat this year after year to continuously improve the value of our shared ocean.
Your Challenge: To log 30+ observations of your ocean or coastline before the end of the year to get us on our way! (READ MORE)
PLEASE SHARE WIDELY!
The more eyes on the ocean and coastlines with diverse perspectives working together, the faster we can move towards our shared goals of restored oceans and flourishing communities.
Mapping our most cherished ocean spaces: the "Ocean Snapshot "project
Local ocean users are increasingly at risk of losing their cherished ocean spaces as governments and businesses push to tap into the perceived untapped wealth of the so-called Ocean Economy. Therefore, this June — in celebration of World Oceans Day — we’re leading the world’s first "Ocean Snapshot" project to make the first map of the ocean from an ocean explorer's perspective. To participate, log your ocean activities and observations in the eOceans® app while you explore. Join us today!
The“Ocean Snapshot” – in celebration of World Oceans Day!
Introducing the Ocean Snapshot project, a groundbreaking initiative on the eOceans® app and platform, offering individuals a chance to make a lasting impact on our beloved ocean.
Our ambitious goal is to unite one million passionate people in June, from all corners of the world's oceans and coastlines, to contribute a minimum of five observations each. These logs capture your activities as well as your observations of others.
The more detailed, the better. Clustered observations within the same hour reveal patterns of space utilization, shedding light on who may be using those areas. However, observations spanning different times of day and days of the week provide a comprehensive understanding of variations and the ocean's dynamics in that space. Thus, logging more observations enhances our collective understanding of the ocean's needs.
What better way to celebrate World Oceans Day?
Each submitted log represents a unique fragment of our shared narrative with the ocean. As these fragments intertwine, they weave a story that reflects our present-day appreciation and value for the ocean. Through repeated collaboration year after year, we can comprehend the evolving nature of our relationship with the ocean and witness the positive changes we foster.
An invitation to all.
No matter how you connect with the ocean—whether it's solitary walks along the shore, riding waves with a small crew, or exploring the depths through diving—your voice and observations are incredibly valuable.
Surfers play a pivotal role as key stakeholders in the ocean, bringing their passion and persuasive voice to advocate for ocean protection and restoration — surfing spaces should not be undervalued for communities. Photo: Johny Goerend, Unsplash
We invite you to join us this June 2023 and use the user-friendly eOceans app to log your observations. Together, we will create the world's FIRST comprehensive map, showcasing human activities and the deep significance we hold for the ocean.
Let's embark on this transformative journey, where our combined efforts will chart a brighter future for our magnificent oceans.
We’ve done this before.
Since 2010, we have been at the forefront of crowdsourced and participatory science projects worldwide.
Through these endeavors, we have amassed millions of ocean observations, enabling us to study endangered species populations, identify threats, inform policies, and advance our understanding of the ocean and our relationship with it. The outcomes of these projects have been published in numerous peer-reviewed scientific journals and have played a vital role in shaping protective measures for species, habitats, and communities (see our IMPACT page for details).
Today marks a significant milestone as we transition from manual data collection and analysis methods to the revolutionary eOceans® mobile app and platform. With this new tool, we are thrilled to guide you through this transformative project, providing real-time access to the results. Now, you can actively participate and witness the impact as it unfolds, just as weI do.
This exciting journey of data collection, sharing, analysis, and dissemination, and leveraging the power of technology to make a lasting difference in ocean science and conservation.
Creating a map of the ocean’s social value is important
Mapping the social value of the ocean through projects like "Ocean Snapshot" is crucial.
It deepens our understanding of the ocean's significance in our daily lives as a vital resource that provides food, livelihoods, recreation, and cultural connections. This mapping reveals the diverse ways people engage with the ocean, transcending sectors and recognizing activities like coastal walks, beach cleanups, and marine research.
It also informs decision-making, policy development, and conservation strategies by providing comprehensive data on human activities and values. Additionally, it fosters community engagement, empowering individuals to contribute and take responsibility for ocean well-being.
Regular mapping establishes a baseline for monitoring and evaluating changes, identifying trends, and adapting strategies to address emerging challenges. That’s why we intend to do this year after year, aligning with World Oceans Day.
Purpose-built technology to scale our cumulative impact
The “Ocean Snapshot” project is using the eOceans® app to collect all ocean observations.
eOceans® is a purpose-built platform designed to revolutionize your ocean exploration journey. The mobile app enables ocean enthusiasts to track their activities and log observations, expand their knowledge of the ocean, and stay updated with real-time trend tracking through expert-developed analytics and display.
In the Ocean Snapshot project, we harness the capabilities of the eOceans app to gather comprehensive ocean observations. By using eOceans, you retain full ownership of your data and enjoy the convenience of contributing effortlessly to the Ocean Snapshot project while seamlessly sharing with other projects of your choice.
No internet connection? No problem! Our app functions offline, allowing you to make observations anywhere in the world during any ocean activity—whether you're diving into the depths, snorkeling amidst coral reefs, casting your line while fishing, riding the waves on a surfboard, gracefully sailing, enjoying a serene beach walk, embarking on a SUP adventure, or even hopping on a ferry. Helping you to track your activities is important to us, so please inform us if your preferred activity is missing from the list, and we will ensure it gets included.
Discover the empowering capabilities of the eOceans app and become an invaluable contributor to the Ocean Snapshot project. Together, let's unveil the secrets of the ocean and pave the way for a future that celebrates its magnificence.
Be an Ocean hero — Easy as 1-2-3
If you see the ocean this June, for any purpose, please make at least 5 logs per day in the eOceans app to make a difference for the future of our ocean! It’s free and simple to participate. Follow these 3 simple steps:
Download the eOceans mobile app on Android or iOS and create an account.
Use the (+) icon to log your activities & observations, and make sure your data upload to the cloud.
Visit the “Ocean Snapshot” project to see the results.
eOceans — For the ocean. For us.
A global network of shark heroes: Help by joining eShark!
eShark has gathered millions of observations from scuba divers and other ocean explorers to describe shark populations to help get the conservation they need. Now, eShark is powered by the eOceans mobile app (iOS and Android) with real-time, expert-developed analytics — so that anyone exploring the ocean today can help and learn how their sharks are doing today.
All ocean explorers are invited to join eShark, using the eOceans platform, to track sharks and their threats around the world, to inform science and policy. Photo: eOceans 2023
Divers have helped saved a lot of sharks
In the twelve years since eShark began, thousands of divers, snorkelers, and other ocean explorers have participated in many eShark projects. These include the Great Fiji Shark Count, eShark Thailand in partnership with Shark Guardian, eManta, Shark Sanctuary Evaluation, and other consequential citizen science projects.
By gathering millions of observations — of sharks, rays, turtles, whales, garbage, and more — hotspots of shark diversity and abundance have been described. For the first time, we’ve been able to show how shark populations change by location, season, and year. We’ve also described threats and evaluated the success of different conservation strategies. These findings have informed many policies like Shark Sanctuaries, Marine Protected Areas, international trade (i.e., CITES) and more.
This would not have been possible without ocean explorers, particularly scuba divers, who reported what they saw. This work has guided science-based decisions that have saved a lot of sharks.
eShark has gathered millions of ocean observations from scuba divers and other explorers to address many science questions and to inform policies that protect sharks. Photo: eOceans 2023
Saving manta rays – an example
People love Manta Rays, a relative of sharks. Tourists spend millions every year to fly around the world just to see them in a few locations. So, alarms rang across the tourism industry and conservation world when they started to disappear from some of the top dive destinations.
Manta rays are sought by poachers for their fins and gill rakers.
We created a spinoff of eShark, eManta, to gather scuba divers’ observations of manta rays – where they see them in the wild, where they see them being fished, and where they are sold in the markets. This study gathered over 600,000 dive observations from 90 regions of the world.
Combined across all observations, we revealed that although only two countries reported catching manta rays, that they were being caught and sold in markets around the world. This was particularly problematic in areas adjacent to popular dive and ecotourism areas, where manta rays provide important socioeconomic value through tourism. The results also suggested that they were being poached from sites where they had local or national protection.
This discrepancy demonstrated that illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing combined with international trade was threatening manta rays with extinction. Therefore, they were listed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which controls international trade so that permits are required to sell manta rays and their parts internationally (these regulations have been strengthened further in 2021).
This was only possible with the participation of scuba divers around the world who cared enough to pay attention and to take a few minutes to log their observations for science.
Tourists fly around the world to spend time with manta rays – a relative to sharks. Divers observations helped manta rays get on the endangered species list. Photo: Jeff Hester / Ocean Image Bank
Tracking sharks for conservation in Thailand, Fiji
Across Thailand and Fiji, two popular dive destinations for sharks, the dive tourism operators and guides were concerned for their sharks. They noticed that many species were declining across many sites, often to the point of absence. They wanted the science that could help them advocate for increased protection of sharks (and their livelihoods), but didn’t have the data to support policy change.
Together, we set up community dive logbooks for all divers to log their dives with their observations of sharks, as well as rays, seahorses, turtles, garbage, and so on.
Dive guides and their guests logged their dives – over 200,000 sharks on 45,000 dives from over 700 sites.
These data provided the first nation-wide descriptions of sharks in both countries.
For the first time ever, using divers’ observations, we were able to describe hotspots of sharks, including sites and seasons with high shark abundance and diversity. Importantly, where there was overlap in a few sites, our results looked just like those from other studies that used scientific observers only.
These studies initiated new shark research, conservation, policy, and other relevant conversations to protect sharks and the future of diving.
Divers recording all their observations from dives around the world can help tell the story of the ocean. Photo: Jett Britnell / Ocean Image Bank
Extending to the blue economy — protecting nature and people
eShark, and citizen science projects like it that collect zero data — where sharks are not seen — also provide insights on key areas for harnessing and protecting the Blue Economy.
When ocean explorers log their activities — where they spend their time doing different activities — trends in this alone, even without the observations, can help communities get a sense of the most important areas for people. This is the Ocean Economy. When those are combined with observations of animals, such as sharks and other biodiversity metrics, they can help prioritize the areas that are good for both humans and nature, which are fundamental to a successful Blue Economy.
Sites that are good for humans and animals could be prioritized for protection.
Governments that are undergoing marine spatial planning exercises and genuinely aim to support a Blue Economy, for example, would prioritize these areas
Too slow to track sharks
Despite great success over the last decade, every eShark project was done manually.
Divers recorded their dives and observations on paper. In Fiji, they had community dive log books contained in binders in the dive shops. In Thailand, dive guides handed out paper log sheets for their dive guides and guests to fill out at the end of a dive. We also tried online surveys. Then, the data were manually entered, and then cleaned and analyzed by scientists using different statistical tools. Finally, we all co-interpreted the results and wrote them up for publication, in peer-reviewed journals.
Publications followed years behind the last data point. Too slow for highly mobile, targeted, declining shark populations.
Additionally, there are ethics requirements that dictate how we can use, or re-use these types of data – we cannot give the data to others or make it open access for others to use.
Instead, to repeat the study, all the data would need to be gathered again.
Ethical uses of data are for good reason, but it slows discoveries and wastes participants time.
Technology to save sharks
eOceans is a purpose-built mobile app and analytics platform that was designed and developed by eShark scientists using the two decades of research and expertise from eShark, eManta, field work, and using large ocean citizen science data.
When divers log observations, eOceans stitches all observations together to tell the picture of sharks in the ocean. Photo: eOceans 2023
Instead of just building a mobile app for eShark, with just sharks, eOceans was designed for all species — to make science more inclusive, accurate, and fast while reaching all parts of our world’s ocean.
The eOceans mobile app enables all ocean explorers (e.g., scuba divers) to log and track their activities (e.g., dives) and observations and to share them with one or thousands of other projects.
To be valuable for science, the policies used by eOceans are aligned with the requirements of research ethics boards at universities and journals.
To accomplish this, data contributors (e.g., divers) own their data and are in control of who they share their data with. When someone is invited to join a project and contributes their observations to that project, then they can help interpret the results by using the community channel. Because the data are analyzed in real-time and are accessible to all contributors, they are also enabled to facilitate knowledge distribution and are empowered to be an integral part of the action dialogue.
With eOceans, people can record observations of animals, human activities, and pollution. For animals, their abundance, health status (e.g., size, injuries, diseases) and behaviours (e.g., mating, breaching) can also be added. This way the presence/absence, abundance, and health of animals can be tracked, not just their presence – health of the species and their threats and ability to thrive.
Some have likened eOceans to Strava for athletes, where ocean explorers track their activities, which represents survey effort. Their dashboard shows their impact by tracking their effort (distance, time) and observations.
Others have likened eOceans to Waze for drivers, where ocean explorers log what they see to help others better understand what’s happening in the ocean.
Goal: 1 billion observations per day to help sharks
At eShark, our vision is to protect and restore sharks to their former abundance and value in the ocean and our mission is to unite all ocean explorers to track shark populations & understand their needs.
To accomplish this, our goal is to gather 1 billion observations per day of sharks, including zeros and their threats — enabling us to track sharks, their threats, and society’s relationship with sharks around the world.
Together, we’ll monitor sharks and their threats while assessing the performance of different shark conservation strategies, such as Shark Sanctuaries, Marine Protected Areas, quotas, CITES listing, and more.
Powered by eOceans, our global eShark team will have science-based results that can help individuals and decision makers to protect sharks and restore their value.
Be a Shark Hero: Join eShark!
If you dive, surf, snorkel, sail, fish, or explore the ocean for any activity that has the chance of seeing a shark you can help sharks.
Blue Economy: A measurable, investable definition
A successful Blue Economy could be the difference between a liveable and an unliveable planet. Helping track and invest in activities that help, not just hurt less, is the goal of our Blue Economy Tracker™ (coming soon!). We needed a judicial definition to make it work, and we describe the rationale for it here. For the ocean. For us.
Blue Economy activities should help — the ocean and people. Credit: Anett Szaszi / Ocean Image Bank
Ocean assets are still valued at $24 trillion — this, after centuries of misuse with productivity, ecosystems, and populations being driven to a small fraction of what they once were.
When the term “Blue Economy” was coined by large ocean states (a.k.a. SIDS) to prioritize economic activities that conserve ocean health and equitable access to ocean spaces, it was a beacon of hope.
Over the last few years, however, a growing number of governments and businesses have, in a rush to exploit the perceived untapped wealth of the ocean’s services, co-opted and bluewashed the term ‘Blue Economy’ to suit their needs. They are using the Blue Economy to include all, or nearly all, ocean activities — including those disconnected from ocean health or equitable access.
But, that’s not what the ocean or the people who depend on it need.
To protect what’s left and restore the value of the ocean, investments are needed in activities that help.
At eOceans, we aimed to build models to help track and invest in the Blue Economy, but current definitions were too vague and disconnected from ocean health to work. So we sought a measurable and trackable definition to deploy in the eOceans platform.
Below, we outline our journey and rationale for our Blue Economy definition.
The definition is important
How we define the Blue Economy not only matters in the way it is tracked — we can’t track it if we can’t define it — but also in how we prioritize and invest in it.
Given that ocean ecosystems continue to be a diminishing remnant of what they once were, with traditional stakeholders and rightsholders being displaced from their traditional grounds, getting the definitions and associated investments right is arguably one of the most important challenges of this decade (see UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development).
It’s not only about growing and sustaining economies — it could be the difference between a liveable and an unlivable planet.
A blue Blue Economy is essential
The ocean covers more than 70% of our planet. As we run out of space on land, we’re increasingly looking towards the ocean for climate regulation, carbon stores, food, medicine, biodiversity security, protecting coastlines, and more. We need to carefully balance our ocean activities with the needs required for a healthy and productive ocean.
History shows us, however, that business-as-usual does not work. Ocean assets are valued at $24 trillion but countless studies have documented precipitous declines in the ecosystem services they provide.
As ‘tipping points’ are reached, these trends are unlikely to be reversible.
While many activities aim to improve on the old ways, such as through reduced fuel consumption, noise production, and pollution, even in the best-case scenarios these activities are still net negative for ocean health and productivity.
For the ocean to recover and support our growing needs, investments need to be directed towards activities that help, not just hurt less.
Use of the term “Blue Economy”
The concept of the blue economy has its roots in the 1992 Rio Earth Summit but came into popularity when it was proposed by large-ocean states to support and promote ocean-based economic activities that integrate conservation and sustainable uses (Rio+20 — UN, 2012). The term has since evolved and devolved.
Large Ocean States (a.k.a., Small Island Developing Nations) introduced the concept of blue economy to prioritize economic activities that support ocean health and equitable access. Photo credit: Alejandro Luengo
Scholars, research-based think tanks, and Indigenous groups have further refined the term to emphasize equitable access, social benefits, climate regulation, and conservation with additions of carbon storage, coastal protection, cultural values, and biodiversity (e.g., Silver, Smith-Godfrey, Bennett, Voyer, Mika).
On the other hand, many large governments and businesses have co-opted the term to include all offshore activities (e.g., Canada-2021, NOAA-2021, EU-2021) or nearly all (‘greener’) offshore activities (e.g., The World Bank-2017).
While it is exciting to see the growing interest in the ocean, expansion and divergence of the use of this term is problematic.
It’s not only a challenge for those who want to track and evaluate the success of the Blue Economy but also for those who want to prudently invest in a “Blue Economy” that actually supports ocean health and equitable access, and not just contribute to greenwashing or bluewashing.
The Ocean Economy and Green Economy
The Ocean Economy is “the sum of the economic activities of ocean-based industries, together with the assets, goods and services of marine ecosystems” (OECD) and the Green Economy is “low carbon, resource efficient and socially inclusive (UNEP)”. Note that the Green Economy does not specify location, so many offshore activities can also be Green.
The World Bank’s Blue Economy includes transport, renewable energy, and waste management.
These activities are particularly problematic for tracking and quantifying the success of the Blue Economy because they could grow and diversify exponentially with diminishing ocean health and loss of traditional access — they are not tied to ocean health or equitable access.
Windfarms help lower global carbon emissions, but they don’t help the ocean or the people who depend on it. Photo: Christine Ward-Paige
Renewable energy, like windfarms, reduce carbon emissions and lower our collective carbon load. Reducing carbon emissions is essential, but windfarms are still net negative to ocean health. Some argue that windfarm structures bring value to the ocean because they artificially inflate the biomass and diversity at the site. However, these same value arguments can also be made for non-renewable energy activities like offshore mining rigs and artificial FADS; but, ecologically speaking, they are foreign objects that destroy native habitat, biodiversity, species distributions, and oceanographic conditions (Bailey, Carpenter, Heery, Raoux ) and also displace other historical users of an area. Again, these activities may help lower our carbon emissions, and therefore slow the rate of anthropogenic sea level rise, seawater warming, and acidification, but they don’t help recovery.
For transport, even in the best-case scenarios where technologies reduced fuel consumption, noise production, and waste discharge to near zero, increasing the number of vessels in the ocean (even if quiet) would still not help the ocean recover, they just hurt less than their predecessors.
None of the existing definitions were explicit or measurable to support informed decisions and investments that would protect or restore ocean health and value.
Our motivation for a new definition
The eOceans app and analytics platform enables ocean teams to track any species, issues, or value of the ocean collaboratively, transparently, in real-time.
We have various scalable, expert-developed analytical packages — such as the MPA Health Tracker™ and MPA Health Score™, the Smart Fishery Tracker™, and the Shark and Ray Tracker™, as well as any species, or issue/threat.
We aimed to create the Blue Economy Tracker™ to help decision makers, marine spatial planners, and investors identify and prioritize activities that protect and restore ocean health and value.
After reviewing existing definitions, we found that they were too vague to be measured and tracked and they were untied to ocean health and equitable access, so we needed a new definition.
The Blue Economy
We developed the following definition:
“Activities where success is fundamentally tied to ocean health; other ‘Blue’ activities are not displaced; and there is sufficient data, understanding, and willingness to prioritize ocean health and community wellbeing”.
This definition allows activities to be scrutinized, categorized, and quantified. It is a subset from the Ocean Economy and separate from the Green Economy. Segregating activities into different Ocean, Green, and Blue categories allows us to track their growth and diversification in relation to ocean health (e.g., biodiversity, abundance) and equitable access.
An analogy may help.
You wouldn’t deplete 90% of your bank account and then have a goal of sustaining it. You’d want to grow it back. With the eOceans definition, we can think of the Ocean Economy as all the money going in and out of your account, the Green Economy as the measures put in place to stop the money going out so fast, and the Blue Economy as the activities that put money back into the account to rebuild it. To restore your account, you need both Green and Blue activities, and they need to be measured and quantified separately. Too much emphasis on Green and the bank account could be empty before Blue even has a chance. (see Will we bankrupt the ocean with sustainability?)
Definition into practice
Blue Economy activities fall on a spectrum of ‘blue-ness’, where they move towards being ‘blue’ as they improve to share with other blue activities and prioritize ocean health and equitable access. (eOceans 2022)
The schematic (above) lists a few activities, including culture, fisheries, tourism, marinas, aquaculture, storytelling, but can include many other activities (e.g., blue carbon). Although this definition excludes many of the activities that were included by others, like energy, mining, transport, and waste management, it expands in other ways to include social and cultural values, storytelling. and entertainment.
Just because an activity is dependent on healthy oceans does not mean that it is Blue — it is a spectrum of Blue-ness.
For example, fishing companies that specialize in black market trade of threatened marine species depend on the ocean, but the value of their items increases as the species decreases so they are not a Blue activity (they also displace other blue activities, and don’t prioritize ocean health and equitable access).
Aquaculture is likely to cause debate, but again, our perception is that “aquaculture” is on a spectrum, from not blue to blue (see Dan Barber’s TED talk).
Special case: Artificial reefs and restoration activities.
Artificial habitats are a complex edge case that comes up time and again and needs to be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Generally, if the artificial habitat is a strategic piece of infrastructure that supports an existing nearby reef with native biodiversity and uses science-based decisions for placement, materials, and monitoring, and will stand the test of time, then it is likely considered a Blue activity.
However, artificial habitats/reefs that are deployed for habitat offsetting, are opportunistically placed, displace native habitats, ecosystems, or species, or use harmful materials that break down into polluting particles (plastics) and don’t provide permanent long-term habitat, would not be considered Blue activities.
Artificial reefs are a complex edge case that need to be considered on a case-by-case basis to be considered a Blue Economy activity. Generally, they should support native species and ecosystems and be expertly designed and placed. Just having something grow is not Blue. Photo credit: The Ocean Agency/The Ocean Image Bank.
Additional note for clean-up activities.
Many activities have become an integral part of supporting a vibrant and successful Blue Economy.
Garbage and pollution cleanups, including ghost gear removal, for example, help the ocean and the people who depend on it. However, they can occur in polluted and depleted ocean spaces, so the success of these activities are not intricately connected to ocean health — not Blue.
Instead they would be considered Green aspects of the pillar they support, such as fisheries or waste management, even if they operate in isolation from that industry (although those industries would do well to recognize and connect to that value).
Marine debris and ghost gear removal is important for supporting a successful Blue Economy, but they are considered Green activities within the ocean pillar they support. Photo credit: Dimitris Poursanidis / Ocean Image Bank
Moving forward.
This definition of the Blue Economy can serve many purposes.
It can be used to intentionally prioritize activities and focus investments and resources in the Blue Economy. It can also help prioritize the Green activities that support the Blue Economy (e.g., cleaning water, reduced noise and pollution, etc.). And, it can help standardize and prioritize activities in Marine Spatial Planning exercises, such as in the design of Marine Protected Areas.
This explicit definition may also impede bluewashing, increase awareness and interest in the topic, and build a more equitable, fair, connected, and collaborative ocean space in the face of our need to protect and recover our ocean assets.
Finally, this definition of the Blue Economy is a call to marine biologists, social scientists, chemists, oceanographers, and Indigenous and local knowledge holders to engage on a massive scale to help businesses, governments, marine spatial planners, and decision makers to monitor, track, understand, and convey what activities fall in the Blue Economy. It’s an opportunity for accountable quantification and innovation of Blue activities that support rebuilding our ocean.
eOceans — For the ocean. For us.
Be part of the solution with a Pilot Project.
If your organization is interested in supporting Blue Economy efforts that are measurable, trackable, and iterative, then contact Christine to get your organization set up with a pilot project today. Getting the right activities the support they need may be the most important thing that needs to get done this decade.
For the ocean. For us.
Smart Fishery Tracker™
The future of fish is uncertain. For the first time in history, fishers are faced with the possibility of being excluded from their historic fishing grounds — displaced for conservation and other economic opportunities. But, fishers see and touch more of the ocean than any other stakeholder and should be considered an important ally in ocean monitoring, management, and conservation. The eOceans® Smart Fishery Tracker™ was designed to help position fishers in this role, to effectively and efficiently improve their efforts, eliminate the barriers that lead to unreported and unregulated fisheries, and enable them to play a critical role in the management and conservation of our ocean.
The future of fish is uncertain. For the first time in history, fishers are faced with the possibility of being excluded from their historic fishing grounds — displaced for conservation and other economic opportunities. But, fishers see and touch more of the ocean than any other stakeholder and should be considered an important ally in ocean monitoring, management, and conservation. The eOceans® Smart Fishery Tracker™ was designed to help position fishers in this role, to effectively and efficiently improve their efforts, eliminate the barriers that lead to unreported and unregulated fisheries, and enable them to play a critical role in the management and conservation of our ocean.
Fishers have been the primary ocean explorers and knowledge holders throughout history. Photo: Erik Lukas, Ocean Image Bank.
A brief history — fish formed global economies
Throughout history, fishers have been the primary ocean explorers and knowledge holders.
For thousands of years, fishers fished without markedly depleting ocean health, but as fish became a commodity – to power global economies – fisheries rapidly expanded. While governments subsidized industrialized techniques to maximize exploitation efficiency and profit, they often dismissed local fishers' concerns regarding declining populations.
These concerns have often proved true decades later, necessitating these same governments to reduce quotas and implement moratoriums across diverse species groups with varying degrees of failure and success.
Future of fish is uncertain.
Today, the future of fish and overall ocean health is uncertain.
The future of fish is uncertain after centuries of misuse combined with growing climate change impacts and the fervent push to grow the ocean economy. For the last Photo: Ahmed Fareed, Unsplash.
After centuries of misuse combined with growing climate change impacts and the fervent push to grow the ocean economy, the ocean and its value to humans are expected to degrade rapidly if business-as-usual continues (Doney et al. 2009; Hoegh-Guldberg 2015; Oliver et al. 2018; Mendenhall et al. 2020). For these reasons, coastal countries are expanding ocean monitoring, management, and conservation strategies to balance ocean health with economic uses (Douvere 2008; Foley et al. 2010).
However, getting these decisions right is not trivial.
Ocean monitoring, management, and conservation needs fishers.
Fishers comprise one of the most diverse and largest ocean stakeholder/rightsholder groups by number, area they cover, and time spent at sea.
They see and touch more of the ocean than any other group. By all accounts, fishers are on the frontlines of ocean change, and, with few exceptions, their lives, livelihoods, and communities depend on fish populations that are abundant.
Thus, fishers should be considered an important ally in ocean monitoring, management, and conservation (Gutiérrez et al. 2011).
Yet, a history of misinformation, broken trust, and unsustainable practices (Worm et al. 2013; Agnew et al. 2009; Ward-Paige et al. 2013), has dissolved relationships and pitted fishers against other stakeholders, scientists, and decision makers (Pomeroy et al. 2007; Spijkers et al. 2018; Mendenhall et al. 2020).
Gathering perspectives.
To understand the contemporary situation, we deployed three approaches.
First, we reviewed available materials on fisheries written by scientists, managers, and fishers, including scientific and gray literature and online documentation (e.g., social media, blogs).
Second, we casually interviewed fishers, fisheries observers, non-fishers in fishing communities, managers, marine and social scientists, and non-governmental organizations that deal with fisheries. We also attended public events (e.g., conferences, town hall meetings) where fisheries-related regulations were discussed (e.g., marine protected areas, quotes, moratoriums). Our conversations covered 28 countries, but were primarily in Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and various Caribbean countries.
Third, we reviewed commercial fishing logbooks and analyzed large fisheries datasets to understand the value and limitations of the data that are collected by fishers, and worked with the fishers who collected the data to uncover their interests.
From these perspectives, we developed a series of analyses that comprise the Smart Fishery Tracker™ tool.
Fishers are influential, and increasingly marginalized.
Our investigations revealed that fishers are still generally regarded as influential in coastal communities, but that their role is in flux.
As discussions evolve about what activities are or will be permitted in the ocean, fishers are faced with the possibility of being excluded from historic fishing grounds for both conservation and economic opportunities (e.g., aquaculture, energy).
Fishers are also feeling targeted by increased fisheries monitoring, where they fear their data will be used against them and they object to the invasion of privacy.
Some fishing groups have become so distressed by these multi-pronged pressures that they have united within associations/societies to collect and process their own fisheries data to hold government scientists and managers accountable and make sure that their interests are upheld.
The Smart Fishery Tracker™
The Smart Fishery Tracker (Fig. 1) was designed for collaboration and privacy.
Figure 1. Example analysis from the Smart Fishery Tracker™. Analyses are found in the eOceans® dashboard and includes spatial and temporal trends of catch and bycatch, with reported animal conditions. For demonstration purposes, we show a few of the analyses performed for the Southwest Lobster Science Society, in Canada, using their fisheries data (shared with permission).
It is a suite of digital tools and analytics that equip fishers and fishing groups with timely, expert-developed analysis of their catch and bycatch data, along with other ocean patterns that interest them (e.g., illegal fishing, invasive species).
It uses the eOceans® platform (Fig. 2), where fishers and their collaborators interact with the platform in two ways.
Figure 2. Schematic of data flow in eOceans® Smart Fishery Tracker™. Fishers log catch, bycatch (species, number, condition) and other observations (e.g., whales, ghost gear, illegal fishers) in the mobile application while at sea. These data are saved in the eOceans® platform for their personal access. Data are streamed to supported projects, where they are analyzed and displayed for co-interpretation by project members.
The first is a mobile application (Fig. 3) where fishers can log their at-sea fishing effort, catch/bycatch, and other observations (e.g., whales, pollution), join projects to automatically share their data for analysis, and review and comment to help co-interpret the results.
Figure 3. Overview of the key components of the data entry part of the Smart Fishery Tracker™. The mobile app eLOG is used for data input by fishers. It automatically captures location, date, time, and other meta-data and the fisher or observer logs catch, bycatch, and other observations that feed the Smart Fishery Tracker™. The eLOG works offline and has precision of under 5 m.
The second is a web application where projects are launched and managed, and the results are reviewed and discussed. Projects can be created by anyone – fishers, fishing associations, managers, NGOs, scientists, consultants, etc. Projects only receive data from the fishers who have joined their project (i.e., it is an opt-in program).
The suite of analyses in the Smart Fishery Tracker combine summary and advanced modeling analysis with graphical and map summaries. The analyses include standardized assessments of catch, bycatch, and catch condition (e.g., size, maturity) using the data that are entered through the mobile application. It also includes analyses of the socioeconomic values of their ocean spaces (e.g., where and when they generally fish so as not to include exact sites) and anthropogenic threats (e.g., pollution, invasive species).
These results can be used for many purposes, from tracking quotas to voluntarily avoiding bycatch hotspots or moving gear that is near endangered species.
Scaling efforts and impact.
Because the ocean is complex and dynamic, the Smart Fishery Tracker™ not only helps fishers track any fishery or fishing area anywhere in the world, it also seamlessly works to track other ocean features in the same or adjacent areas.
Other eOceans® platform features that work well with the Smart Fishery Tracker™ include:
1) Community Channel, where fishers can broadcast interesting observations to their followers, which can be used to identify new, potentially invasive species, threats to the fishery, and bycatch that are to be avoided;
2) Comments tab, where fishers can comment on the results to help co-interpret their meaning or to improve data quality;
3) Timely Matters Notifications, where a text message can be sent to the team when a specific observation is logged, such as an endangered whale, that enables timely action (e.g., move gear);
4) Data Pipes, where external data sources, such as OBIS and ERDDAP, can piped into a project to extend baselines or to develop more advanced analyses (eg., fish with temperature and fisheries); and
5) other analyses and Trackers, like the MPA Health Tracker™, the Shark & Ray Tracker™, or the Blue Economy Tracker™, so fishers can easily and seamlessly participate in other dimensions of ocean tracking that matter to them.
A dent in IUU fishing.
Unreported and unregulated fishing often gets unfairly lumped in with illegal fishing and other criminal activities (IUU) (Song et al. 2020).
A lot of government scientists and managers are simply spread too thin with their workloads to manage all the fishers and fisheries. Therefore, a lot of fisheries simply don’t get monitored or regulated because of a lack of resources, not criminal activity.
The Smart Fishery Tracker™ offers a unique and affordable solution to effectively ending unreported and unregulated fishing since any fisher, in any fishery, anywhere in the world can now report their catch and, starting at less than $1000 per year, can have their analyzed for interpretation.
The future of fish.
The eOceans® platform has deployed different tools to identify and minimize errors, including using the metadata from the phone (e.g., location, date, time), flagging observation outliers, and an in-app field guide to help correctly identify species in the field.
This way, fishers and fishing teams can unite and get started tracking fisheries and fish populations, as well as other dimensions that may affect their fishery and access to fishing grounds — positively or negatively. Together, they can make informed decisions to benefit fish, fisheries, and fishers.
The Smart Fishery Tracker™ unites people to make informed decisions that benefit fish, fisheries, and fishers. Photo: Connor Holland, Ocean Image Bank.
eOceans — For the ocean. For us.
Ethics of ocean data: Caution for coastal communities and the growing blue economy
A rapidly growing number of organisations collect, distribute, and use ocean data from the backyards of communities that depend on the ocean. Use of these data could upend local ways of life. Below, I elaborate on the issues, share perspectives, and describe why and how the eOceans® platform was designed with ethics at its core.
A rapidly growing number of organisations collect, distribute, and use ocean data from the backyards of communities that depend on the ocean. Use of these data could upend local ways of life. Below, I elaborate on the issues, share perspectives, and describe why and how the eOceans® platform was designed with ethics at its core.
Aquaculture has been touted as a solution to feeding the growing human population. It also has a history of degrading ecosystems, native species, and displacing communities. Innovators, investors, stakeholders, and rightsholders need to be informed and working to drive a successful blue economy that supports ocean health, wealth, equitable access, and community wellbeing. Photo: Bob Brewer.
Examples for context.
What if… an ocean tech company placed an array of sensors that collected data that were used to identify the next aquaculture site, which diminished ocean health and displaced historical users of the ocean space?
What if… a tourist scuba diver shared their observations in a free (nothing is free!) mobile app (there are many!) and those data were sold or shared with poachers that targeted species?
What if… a scientist published environmental data in an open source repository that were then used to place a wind farm without consulting locals?
What if … marine animal first responders collected observations of endangered species and their threats (e.g., whale entanglements, strandings, ship collisions) and those data weren’t analysed or used to mitigate future threats?
What if… an organisation published maps of ocean bathymetry, including pinnacles that contain high abundances of fish, and those maps were made available to poachers to target prime fishing locations?
What if… an ocean ‘restoration’ company and government decided to build a ‘restoration’ site in a socially or biologically significant site (e.g., where surfers surf) to offset damage done elsewhere and that ‘restoration’ destroyed the native habitat and value?
These scenarios are real.
They highlight the urgent need for caution and new approaches to cross-sector collaboration and input when collecting and distributing ocean data.
An explosion of data.
There has been a recent explosion of ocean tech companies, researchers, governments, and NGOs tapping into the rapidly growing ocean economy and blue economy by collecting and distributing ocean data.
Buoy-, ROV-, Robot-, Camera-, Censor-, Satellite-, Measurement-, Software-, Community-, Data-as-a-service organisations collect and transfer data about the ocean to businesses, governments, researchers, and others who use the data for various reasons.
These data stream from the backyards of communities that depend on the ocean. Communities that have evolved to value their ocean spaces for traditional, cultural, recreational, and commercial purposes. But, most stakeholders and rightsholders are not made aware of the data being collected and few fully understand the potential risks.
Having detailed ocean datasets that contain high resolution, accurate, standardised, accessible, and timely data is necessary for understanding and making informed decisions about ocean uses, but there are significant pitfalls that need to be considered.
The number of sensors and robots carrying sensors to collect and distribute ocean data is growing rapidly. Governance, or even conversations about governance, on who can and should be able collect or access these data is still in its infancy. Photo credit: Hanson Lu
(Very) Brief Primer on Ethics.
In my experience, few people outside of academia consider the ethics of ocean data. Data breaches and tech companies selling our personal data may have accustomed us, as individuals, to easily dismiss the risks associated with ocean data. These risks, however, could be far reaching and unforeseen.
Fortunately, there are many existing guidelines to help direct the ethical collection and use of ocean data.
Relevant to ocean data, ethical considerations generally fall into human, animal, and environmental categories.
When working with humans, protocols state that participants must be fully informed about the goals and risks and consent to participating, and must not mislead or waste their time. Therefore, any project that collected data from local knowledge holders or coastal communities that was used to harm them without them understanding the risk and still providing their consent is unethical. Communities need to be aware of and consent to the risks, including those that extend to their livelihoods, social or cultural values, and rights to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.
When working with animals, protocols stipulate that the benefits must outweigh the risks and the number of animals and their degree of suffering should be minimised. Collecting data about animals and not using those data to their fullest extent, such as to minimise the number of animals that suffer (e.g., entanglements, ship collisions) is unethical. Data should be leveraged to help protect future animals from undue harm.
Environmental ethics generally aim to protect and sustain biodiversity and ecological systems. Providing sensitive ocean data to exploitative or uninformed users, especially in areas without fully developed marine spatial plans and enforcement capacity, is unethical. Care is needed to ensure the humans, species, and ecosystems are carefully considered.
The numerous examples presented at the beginning of this essay demonstrate the fallout that can occur when the ethics of ocean data have not been fully considered.
Perspective matters.
Motivations for collecting and using ocean data vary widely. Academics, inventors, businesses, communities, governments, and the public have different mindsets regarding ocean data, and many will exploit the data for nefarious reasons. Effectively balancing value with risk in ocean data requires consideration by diverse stakeholders.
My perspective comes from nearly 30 years as an ocean science researcher, teacher, entrepreneur, tech founder, inventor, ocean diver and explorer, and someone who has interviewed thousands of ocean stakeholders in over 38 coastal countries. My research and teaching experience required human and animal ethics approvals. I’ve also been in many positions to recommend decisions that would affect local communities, including placing “artificial reef” structures and recommending changes to marine policies, protected areas, fisheries, and pollution.
What if… an ocean 'restoration' company and government decided to put a restoration site at a socially significant site (e.g., where surfers surf) to offset a development somewhere else and it destroyed the site for current users or species? Photo credit: Alistair MacRobert
Status quo of ocean data.
In developing the policies that would dictate how the eOceans platform collects and distributes data, I met with hundreds of ocean organisations and decision makers to understand existing data policies. I found that data policies varied widely but generally fell into four main approaches:
1) Open access and freely available.
2) Do not share because they own the data.
3) Cannot share because they don’t maintain a database.
4) Cannot share because the data were collected under ethical permissions that prohibit sharing without permission.
Costs of each approach.
Each approach has different values and risks.
1) Open access and free to use.
Open access and free to use ocean data has been pushed by many academics and international programmes (e.g., OBIS, CIOOS, IOOS, GBIF) because it is seen as “fundamental for improving the ways we observe the oceans”. Open and freely available data, following FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable), saves time and resources and allows scientists, decision makers, businesses, and communities to have data they may not have otherwise.
Open access data, however, can be especially risky to local stakeholders and rightsholders. Although some repositories have protection for endangered species, targeted species and special places remain vulnerable to exploitation in open data. The risks are particularly high in areas where marine spatial planning and enforcement are not fully developed. Wildlife poachers and other exploitation companies exploit open data to identify and target coveted resources.
Similarly, open data generated by fishers or local knowledge holders (e.g., participatory or citizen science) would expose special places and species. And, there is additional risk with local knowledge being made open because it diminishes the possibility of re-consent and puts researchers in an ethical conundrum.
2) Do not share because they own the data.
Companies, academics, and governments often don’t share data — they are gatekeepers.
The reasons for gatekeeping vary.
They can include corruption and greed, but it can also be more simple and/or legitimate.
Some don’t make their ocean data open or freely available because they provide data-as-a-service — it’s their business model. Others, especially smaller organisations or one-off research projects, don’t have datasets that were designed to fit into larger sampling strategies and they have self-created methods that aren’t easily shareable.
Others, however, don’t share data because they want proprietary access. This type of gatekeeping is particularly problematic when the work involves “helicopter science” or participatory/citizen science, where the data, information, and knowledge leave the communities from where they were collected. Additional challenges arise because participants and communities have wasted their efforts and resources with little benefit.
3) Cannot share because they don’t maintain a database.
A lot of small-medium organisations, despite collecting data, do not actually have databases. In some cases this is understandable because it is arduous and expensive to create, maintain, and use databases, especially if data science is not a priority. Not using the data, however, has ethical dilemmas.
Marine animal first responders are a good example. They collect essential data, typically from phone hotlines, about marine animals that have died or are in distress (e.g., stranded, entangled, injured) and need assistance. Their priority is helping the animal in need so most don’t maintain databases. If they did it right, however, they could have powerful datasets that could help mitigate animal suffering by identifying and averting threats.
Education-focused NGOs and companies (e.g., voluntourism) are another example. They send people — volunteers, citizen scientists, tourists — into the field to ‘collect data’. Most never move the data off paper log sheets and a few stated they don’t care because their goal is to make people ‘feel’ engaged. The ethical dilemma here is multi-fold because not only are the data not being used (e.g., for conservation, marine spatial planning, science) but the participants are being misled into believing they are collecting data for a cause and are wasting their time if they could have joined another organisation that would actually use their data.
4) Cannot share the data because the data were collected under ethical permissions that prohibit sharing without re-consent.
This is the barrier that was relevant to my own research. I worked at a university and would collect data about animals and ocean spaces using the observations made by humans. Depending on the project, I needed both human and animal ethics approvals. My permission to use these data only extended to what participants consented to, mainly the paper that would be produced at the end.
This put my own work into an ethical dilemma where I, with the help of local experts, described the patterns of threatened species (e.g., sharks). After many species were listed on CITES other researchers wanted to use the data to understand how the listing helped populations. Further investigations could help decision makers further refine or enforce policies and reduce the number of animals and communities that continue to suffer from illegal, undocumented, and unregulated fishing. Repeating the survey would waste a lot of time and resources, but using the data for this purpose would not be possible without re-consent.
Diverse ocean stakeholders, rightsholders, businesses, technology, and governments are competing for ocean spaces. Wind farms, for example, are displacing historical fisheries and animal migration routes. Photo: Christine Ward-Paige
Ethics at the intersection.
While ocean tech appears to be a blue ocean opportunity under the umbrella of growing the so-called ‘blue economy’, caution is needed throughout the phases of research and development, business model creation, investment, scaling ‘solutions’, policy creation, etc.
On the other hand, coastal communities also have an important role to play. It is important that they know what data are being collected, who has access, and possibly develop their own policies around the collection, distribution, and uses to ensure they receive maximum benefit and minimal risk. They should also understand and be able to advocate for decisions that align with their values and livelihoods.
Open source data and maps, including bathymetric maps that show all the ocean’s pinnacles – where fish aggregate – enable industrial fishers and poachers to easily target and rapidly overfish prime fishing locations. This is particularly problematic in areas or countries with limited enforcement capacity. Photo: Chris Davis.
eOceans cares.
Our mission at eOceans is to be the company that helps rebuild ocean health and wealth by bringing people, data, and knowledge together in real-time for actionable decisions.
Our metrics of success are:
✅ bountiful marine species
✅ healthy marine ecosystems, and
✅ thriving coastal communities
We spent years researching and developing the policies that dictated the design and function of the eOceans platform. Although we’ll always look for ways to improve, the goal is to maximise benefit and minimise risk for coastal communities, ecosystems, and species.
We are also extremely interested in fostering relationships and partnerships with other organisations that deploy ethical approaches — the more there are to work with, the better.
What eOceans does.
The eOceans platform empowers and enables local knowledge holders — scientists, fishers, tourism operators, recreational explorers, etc. — to quantitatively tell their stories.
Ocean observations are logged in the eOceans mobile app and automatically analysed at all spatial scales. Researchers and organisations can use the eOceans platform to gather observations to track any marine species, protected areas, issues, fisheries, poaching, social values, etc. Photo: eOceans
To break silos and facilitate collaboration across locations and perspectives, eOceans harnesses the approach of F.A.I.R. data while also adhering to the concepts of privacy, consent, and data sovereignty. The data that come into the eOceans mobile app or that are exported through our reports are standardised following international standards (i.e., Darwin Core, WoRMS) that facilitate the sharing of biodiversity data. Instead of making the data open and freely available like others, the eOceans platform itself is open and free. Users can contribute as much data as they like, on any species, any issue, anywhere in the world’s ocean or connected freshwater ecosystems for free.
eOceans staff scientists use the eOceans data and platform to track global trends in a few dimensions (e.g., sharks, whale strandings, pollution) and the platform can be used by other researchers and organisations to conduct their work at the spatial scales they need.
To enable collaboration, transparency, and trust eOceans users:
✅ Own their data
✅ Decide how their data can be used
✅ Assist with the interpretation of results
✅ Facilitate knowledge distribution, and are an
✅ Integral part of the action dialogue
The data cannot be removed from the platform for external purposes without the explicit permission of the data contributors. This way participants are empowered to decide how their data are used and can be part of the risk mitigation strategy.
Additionally, all the data within each project are automatically analysed by the eOceans platform and the results are displayed in near real-time so contributors can always see what’s happening in their communities with their contributions.
Finally, for further transparency, the eOceans platform has a dedicated space for projects to declare their ethics statements and acknowledgements (e.g., funders) so that all project leaders can transparently share any potential conflicts of interest with their contributors.
Call-to-Action
Initiate productive conversations! Innovators, entrepreneurs, investors, organisations, and governments in the data collection, storage, distribution and use space should engage with each other, and with local knowledge holders and coastal communities, to develop and deploy ethical strategies for ocean data to support an equitable blue economy without jeopardising coastal communities.
Let us know! We’d love to hear about the data that have been collected in your ocean. Have there been mostly benefits, or also costs?
Getting this right is not trivial, so the more detailed conversations we can have with broad audiences and perspectives, the closer we can all get to a healthy ocean and equitable ocean spaces.
eOceans — For the ocean. For us.
We’d love to have you join our global community of ocean explorers tracking the ocean in real-time:
Join eOceans on your mobile device (iOS, Android) or desktop. Use the mobile app to log what you see when you are under, on, or next to the ocean or a connected water body.
We saved a lake! A lesson in tracking what you love.
Thirty days after starting to track this lake with eOceans, we helped save it! Learn how.
Thirty days after starting to track this lake with eOceans, we helped save it!
Where the kids are standing, that’s where the water line was 30 days earlier. By tracking the lake daily with the eOceans app, we were able to demonstrate to decision makers that the lake was draining at an alarming rate. Photo: C Ward-Paige
Around the world, nature and people depend on lakes and other freshwater and coastal ecosystems. This is especially true in urban areas where land has been paved and waterways have been buried. The water that remains plays an integral roll in nature and human wellbeing.
Maynard Lake in Nova Scotia, Canada, is one such lake.
Thirty days ago, I started using the eOceans mobile app to track this lake.
I did this for three main reasons.
As the founder of eOceans, I wanted to test different features of the eOceans app for collecting data offline in the field. The lake is closer than the ocean, so that would allow me to test in real life many times a day.
Many people have enquired about using eOceans to track freshwater ecosystems — including fish, invasive species, pollution, and socio-economic values. I wanted to know how well it does and where the limitations might be.
My community loves this lake and I thought it would be great to get a baseline of the animals and people that use it. It might come in handy in the case of something bad happening to it in the future (e.g., development, pollution, climate change, water extraction).
I set up a project on the eOceans platform called “We Love Maynard Lake”. I created my own “standardized sampling strategy” that would simply include sitting on a log and taking a “sample” in the same location “often”.
A sample takes about 15 seconds using eOceans and includes capturing a location and timestamped picture and adding observations of animals, humans, threats, and the weather.
I didn’t specify how often I would sample, just aiming for weekly. I would also add opportunistic observations of anything interesting on the fly.
“We Love Maynard Lake” project found in the eOceans dashboard. Photo: eOceans.
🗓Week 1: Everything seemed normal. I really only expected to find seasonal changes, so I wasn’t surprised. However, I did find it interesting that all the excess rainwater we received during Hurricane Fiona was gone already and the water was now about ‘normal’. I assumed evaporation and refilling the water table had taken the excess.
🗓Week 2: I noticed the lake level was lower than I’d ever seen before in the 7 years of living here. Even though it was only about 5" lower than “normal”, since it followed being exceptionally high after the rains that came with Hurricane Fiona, it was a total loss of 10" compared to the week before. This raised my suspicion.
I posted my observation in a local FaceBook group. One person suggested that was the reason they had observed a “bunch of dead fish” along the shoreline.
So, I called the water utility corporation to let them know — they control the water level.
I also increased the sampling interval — sampling daily or twice daily in the eOceans app.
🗓Week 3: I documented the lake level continuing to fall. By this stage it was about 1.5 feet lower than normal. By this time, all the wetland habitats that surround the perimeter of the lake had nearly dried out. I called the water utility again to see if an investigation had been done and to remind them to do so.
🗓Week 4 — By this time, I had documented a 2.5 ft loss in water level in just 22 days. It was falling about 5" per day. The water level had fallen well below the wetland areas, they were totally dried out, and the other side of the lake was eerily close.
The lake was losing about 8.3 million litres of water per day. No one knew this was happening. By logging in the eOceans app, we were able to document the loss and convince decision makers to take action. Photo: eOceans.
I estimate that we were losing about 8.3 million litres of water per day. That’s the equivalent of about 21 olympic pools of water in 22 days.
🦆🦅🐠🐟🐢 The birds were no longer bathing or feeding along the shoreline as they had done before — ducks were now out in the deeper parts of the lake and would be having a hard time feeding. There were no more fish, frogs, or turtles to be seen, but that could be seasonal.
I was not only concerned for the wildlife and wetland ecosystems that surround the lake, but I was also, selfishly, concerned that we’d lose the lake for winter skating or summer swimming. This would require a lot of rain to refill.
I alerted a few other people in the community, two of which had already reached out to the city councillor and the water utility. They again jumped on the horn with the water utility and added federal, provincial, and municipal government representatives.
We included images of my timestamped, standardized eOceans logs of the lake that clearly documented the very low water level.
One official said “it must be natural in origin” because the water utility said their equipment was all operating as expected.
A few hours later, however, THE ACTION BEGAN!
By logging the shoreline of the lake everyday, I was able to visually document that it was rapidly draining when no one in charge knew there was a problem. They were able to find and fix a broken dam and stop it from draining. Now it needs to refill. Photo: eOceans 2022
Thanks to the efforts of Halifax Water, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and Sam Austin, they found that a faulty dam was responsible and quickly made the move to fix it.
It’s now 5 days later and the lake has stopped draining!
We love Maynard Lake for swimming, fishing, skating, paddle boarding, sailing, nature rejuvenation, and more. So, now, we’ll anxiously wait for rain to refill it — for nature, cleaning the lake, and for our winter skating or summer swimming activities.
I am so glad that I just happened to start logging the lake when I did.
And, it was a valuable demonstration of the importance of Tracking What You Love using the eOceans platform!
For the ocean. For us.
**Watch a video description of this project on the eOceans YouTube channel.
Ocean spaces cannot be well managed without fishers: The Smart Fishery Tracker™ is here to help
Our ocean cannot be well managed without including fishers in the action dialogue. Working with fishers, through participatory science, is possibly the most important action that needs to be accomplished for ocean health this year. The eOceans® Smart Fishery Tracker™ is here to help.
Our ocean cannot be well managed without including fishers in the action dialogue. Working with fishers, through participatory science, is possibly the most important action that needs to be accomplished for ocean health this year.
Fish populations are highly dynamic. Successful management of fisheries requires a lot of data, monitoring, and life history information, including data on catch and bycatch numbers. Photo: eOceans (2022)
We can’t tell you how many fishers have told us that “fisheries scientists and managers don’t know what they’re doing’’. They exclaim we are “closing the fishery in the wrong place at the wrong time” and they believe that scientists have significant data gaps, or that they cherry pick the data, analysis, and results to match their own hypotheses.
We’ve repeatedly seen how these top-down decisions regarding fisheries management, marine spatial planning, and marine protected areas tear communities apart.
Here, we make the case that working with fishers is possibly the most important barrier to overcome for ocean health this year and that this can be facilitated through participatory science. We also introduce the new eOceans® Smart Fishery Tracker™, which offers real-time catch and bycatch assessments for the first time. This is necessary for keeping pace with rapid ocean change.
By the end, you should see the value of deploying the Smart Fishery Tracker™ in your community — to track fisheries and other ocean dimensions, in real-time.
“Let’s Dive In”
Everyone reading this likely has an appreciation of how spectacular the ocean is and how spectacularly important it is — including for fishers and fisheries.
But, the ocean is significantly depleted due to misuse, miscommunication, and delayed action — often from decisions that are made far away. As a result, biodiversity, habitats, mammals, fish, coral, seagrass, and many other dimensions are now a fraction of their original condition. These changes have altered what lives in the ocean, their abundance, and condition. Climate change is further amplifying these impacts, and wreaking havoc on the ecosystems that so many people depend on.
Marine science, policy, management, and actions — with manual methods of handwriting down our observations, entering the data into spreadsheets, and analyzing for one question at a time — cannot possibly keep pace with ocean change or the rapidly growing blue economy.
eOceans was designed for real-time data sharing, mapping, analysis, and dissemination. It can be used by scientists and all other ocean stakeholders & rightsholders, including fishers.
Including fishers is essential for ocean management
We believe that including fishers in the ocean action dialogue should be seen as an integral part of ocean health.
Fishers are important ocean stakeholders that are continuously accumulating local community and ocean knowledge. Breaking divides between fishers, scientists, managers, and decision makers is an essential barrier to overcome for ocean health this year. Photo: Anastasia Palagutina, Unsplash.
Fishers are one of the oceans most important stakeholders. They are out there everyday, everywhere, covering the ocean with high effort and experience, while continuously accumulating local community and ocean knowledge. They cover spatial and temporal scales that scientists, and most other ocean explorers can’t match. They are also the ones that see and touch more of the ocean than most others. And, they depend on a bountiful ocean — where their livelihoods and experiences not only depend on an abundance of fish that are relatively easy to catch, but they also feed a lot of people, including supplying markets, restaurants, stores, and personal refrigerators.
Unfortunately, the relationships between fishers, scientists, & managers have been severely strained. This needs to change. Working with fishers is essential.
Participatory Science is Invaluable
This leads us to the value of Participatory Science (aka., citizen science, community science) for building scientific knowledge and informing management and policy.
Ocean explorers — divers, fishers, boaters, surfers, sailors — care about their ocean. They also see a lot. Each of their observations and perspectives can be combined to better understand the ocean to make smarter decisions and more equitable policies. Photo: Sebastian Pena Lambarri
Here, we provide three examples where local data and knowledge informed policy:
In the first, catch, bycatch, and effort data were compiled from commercial fishers and used to evaluate time-area closures — a type of Marine Protected Area — that were designed to protect Atlantic cod and yellowtail flounder while they are spawning. We found that, after 15 years of implementation, this protection strategy was not helping. Something else would be needed to help cod and yellowtail populations recover.
The second example comes from tourism. The community in Fiji was concerned that sharks were disappearing. By collecting over 146,000 shark observations from 30,000 dives on 592 sites, we not only described shark and tourism baselines — who goes where and when — but we also found that the most common species, the whitetip reef shark, did decline significantly on all eastern sites but increased on all western sites. They couldn’t have known this if we had not compiled and analyzed their data. But, we still don’t understand the drivers of these changes.
In the third example, we collected observations of manta rays from local experts in 90 regions of the world — including where they see mantas in the wild, where they see them being fished, and where they see them being sold in the markets. We found that although only two countries reported catching manta rays, that they were being caught and sold in markets around the world. Illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing with international trade was threatening populations and the tourism communities that depend on them. This discrepancy in reporting combined with threats was used to support their listing on CITES Appendix II.
All this is to say that participatory science can be extremely valuable if it’s done right. Building trusting relationships with transparent data collection methods and analysis is essential for that to happen.
The Smart Fishery Tracker™ — real-time catch tracking
That brings us to the new eOceans tool — the Smart Fishery Tracker™—which offers fishers, scientists, managers, observers, fisheries associations, and fishing societies the possibility of real-time catch and bycatch assessments. These assessments also fit into other ocean tracking priorities through the eOceans platform, like Marine Protected Areas, Blue Economy, Environmental issues, Species at Risk, Invasive species, and more.
NEW eOceans® tool — the Smart Fishery Tracker™– analyzes fisheries catch and bycatch data as they are entered in the eOceans mobile app. Assessments can take place at both the population and/or spatial scales so that fisheries can be more explicitly and transparently managed. Photo: eOceans
With the Smart Fishery Tracker™, fishers and scientists use the eOceans mobile app to log their data, including effort, catch, bycatch, and the human dimensions (e.g., threats and values). Catch can include species, number, and their condition, such as size, maturity, diseases, etc.
Then, their data automatically go to the teams or projects they have joined. For example, if there are 3,000 projects that overlap your area — say Florida — and you’ve only joined 3, then your observations only go to those 3 projects based on your location.
Then, the data are quality checked and analyzed, with expert analysis, in real-time.
The results, and much more can be found on your mobile app or eOceans dashboard. Each project has different tabs of information associated with it, including contributors, observations, management, metrics, etc. In the results tab, that’s where you’ll see your catch and bycatch assessment results streamed in real-time.
With the Smart Fishery Tracker™ you know how your stocks are doing today, not how they were doing years ago (the current standard).
Then, after reviewing the results, contributors can help the team interpret the results and comment on the trends in the eOceans Community Channel for truly collaborative and transparent science.
With eOceans, projects can:
✅ Take place anywhere in the world’s ocean or connected ecosystems — the team owner defines the study area boundaries.
✅ Include the observations made during any desired activity — hook and line fishing, spearfishing, diving, etc. It can be “all activities” or a subset.
✅ Focus on any of over 200,000 species, including presence/absence, species richness, relative abundance, condition/behaviour, size, diseases, health
✅ Include any human dimension, including threats (e.g., ghost gear, pollution, plastics) and values (e.g., social, economic, cultural)
✅ Include most environmental predictor variables (e.g., temperature, DO, pH, microplastics)
✅ Include any amount of effort — but the usually the more the better of course!
Because fish don’t act on their own — but rather interact with temperature, predators, prey, and human pressures — we can also facilitate most multi-variate, interactive models.
To facilitate collaboration, transparency, and trust eOceans users:
✅ Own their data
✅ Decide how their data can be used
✅ Have input on the interpretation of the results
✅ Facilitate knowledge distribution and are
✅ Empowered to be an integral part of the action dialogue
Because the analyses are setup at the beginning of the project, and the data are automatically quality checked and streamed into the project and analyzed in real-time, there is no chance of cherry picking — or perceived cherry picking — to produce results.
And, that’s just the tip of the iceberg! eOceans has many more valuable tools and features that support ethical data sharing and real-time analysis.
That brings us to you, and the role you can play in getting the Smart Fishery Tracker™ deployed in your area to help fisheries get smartly managed. Let the organizations that make decisions in your area know about the Smart Fishery Tracker™ and demand that collaborative, transparent, real-time science is being done to make informed decisions in collaboration with fishers.
In the meantime, you can start generating your personal baseline of your ocean by logging your observations in the eOceans mobile app. And, follow others while you’re there — so we can all learn from each other about what’s happening in the ocean around the world. All observations are connected.
If you’re on your mobile device, you can get started by downloading the eOceans app on iOS or Android, on your desktop you can join at eOceans.app, or learn about our case studies at eOceans.org. You can follow us through the regular social media sites (FB, IG, LI) and keep learning about eOceans tools and science by watching our YouTube channel.
For the ocean. For us.
**This essay was delivered at the 75th Gulf and Caribbean Fisheries Institute (GCFI) in November 2022 and the presentation can be found on YouTube.
“A Magnum Opus of citizen science”: Tracking Fiji’s Shark Populations
A magnum opus of citizen science: 592 sites, 30,668 dives, and 146,304 shark observations.
In 2011, the Fijian dive tourism community reached out to collaborate on describing their shark populations. They did this because scuba divers in Fiji love sharks, dive tourism businesses depend on healthy shark populations, and they were concerned that sharks were being overfished and needed protection.
But, they didn’t have the numbers…What species? Where? What months? What are the baselines? Threats? etc.
The community united together to document their shark observations on every dive – including zeros – eOceans supported the survey design and performed the analysis, and they co-wrote the paper.
Today, this “Magnum Opus of citizen science”, as one of the reviewers called it, was published by Pacific Conservation Biology.
With over 146,304 shark observations from 30,668 dives on 592 sites, it was an incredible participatory science project that produced many novel findings.
Divers in Fiji love sharks, and shark diving contributes more than USD$42-million annually. Shown here is the famous Beqa Shark Dive, Fiji. Photo: The Ocean Agency / Ocean Image Bank
Why sharks?
Scuba divers and snorkelers love sharks!
Dive operators across Fiji offer incredible dive opportunities to their guests who flock to Fiji from around the world. Sharks, along with crystal clear waters and high marine biodiversity, are the main attractions.
Shark-specific dive tourism in Fiji is valued at USD$42-million annually.
So, alarms rang when they noticed sharks disappearing in many locations and they also observed sharks being fished and sold in local and international markets. This prompted the dive community to quantify their sharks to better understand their distributions and to have the results they need to advocate for science-based conservation.
Shark caught in fishing net, Fiji. Photo: Tom Vierus / Ocean Image Bank
Launching the Great Fiji Shark Count.
The Great Fiji Shark Count was urged by Beqa Adventure Divers — home of the “The best shark dive in the world”.
eOceans founder, Dr. Christine Ward-Paige, had just finished a PhD that documented the value and limitations of using scuba divers’ observations to track shark populations. She had also just begun eShark and eManta, to crowdsource observations from ocean explorers to track global shark and manta ray populations and their threats. So she was keen to support the idea of the Great Fiji Shark Count (GFSC) when they reached out.
First, we co-designed the surveys and datasets needed to describe and track shark populations.
Then, we created a community logbook. A binder with paper log sheets was mailed to all participating dive operators for dive guides and their guests to record each dive, regardless of what was seen.
Before each dive, dive guides instructed guests about the marine region, the objectives of the GFSC, and presented a field guide to correctly identify the sharks they can potentially encounter in Fiji.
At the end of each dive, everyone logged their dive – including site name, date, bottom time, depth, feeding/provisioning, and spearfishing. Divers also logged their observations of sharks, including species, abundance, mating, and the presence of juveniles (possible nurseries sites). This included zeros – when no sharks were seen. To increase the value of the dataset, we also collected observations of rays, turtles, seahorses, whales, and dolphins (these data have not yet been analyzed).
At the end of each GFSC, which took place in April and November every year, the datasheets were mailed into headquarters for entry into spreadsheets, then we performed quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC).
One major issue was location. Site name was chosen as the location identifier because the community did not want to make coordinates available for fear of poaching. Site name, however, turned out to be particularly challenging because dive operators have different names, or spellings of names, for the same site. For example, “Christine’s Bommie” could also be called “The Bommie”, “Chris’ Bommie”, “Chrissy’s Bommie”, or “Bommie”. One site with many names. Or, there were multiple sites with the same name (e.g.,“The Aquarium”). This made it challenging to associate sightings from multiple operators to the same site. Rather than trying to conform the dive operators to use our site list, we instead had each operator create their own list and then we cross compared and worked back from there to create one main site list.
It was an extremely slow process, and we had to work through many issues, but we eventually got there.
Since there was so much data, the next challenge was figuring out what data, analysis, and results to show.
A “Magnum Opus of Citizen Science”
The commitment of the Fijian dive community to the project was outstanding. It took years of dedication for each of these dives to be accumulated and processed. This was long before the eOceans mobile app and analytics platform was built. Participants received very little feedback during the course of the project, but they stuck with it and created one of the largest, longitudinal surveys of sharks ever.
From 2011 to 2016, thirty-nine (39) dive operators from across Fiji conducted the Great Fiji Shark Count (GFSC).
They sampled 592 sites!
They recorded observations from 30,668 dives!
They recorded 146,304 shark observations!
Together, they recorded the distribution and relative abundance of 11 shark species, including two Critically Endangered species (Scalloped and Great Hammerhead), three Endangered species (Grey Reef, Sicklefin Lemon, Zebra Shark), and five Vulnerable species.
The diversity (species richness) and abundance differed by area. Feeding also impacted shark species richness and abundance. Some species were never observed on a feed dive (e.g., leopard/zebra, scalloped hammerhead and great hammerhead sharks), others were more common on feed dives (e.g., bull, blacktip reef sharks). Whitetip reef sharks were ubiquitously common across areas and sites. Figures: Ward-Paige et al. 2022
We found that sharks are observed on 45% of dives (13,846 dives) at 74% of the sites (441 sites). ** Note the importance of zeros here! We couldn’t state these percentages if we didn’t collect zeros.
We found that sharks varied by site, area, season, and year in terms of their presence or absence, diversity (richness), and relative abundance.
Generally, our results matched those from other, more limited surveys, including from
baited-remote-underwater-video (BRUVs). Both reviewers thought this was interesting since a lot of effort has focused on BRUVs for sampling sharks.
We also found that there were more sharks per dive in April than November.
Seasonal variations, including species with relatively small home ranges, are interesting from a science perspective since scientists typically have “field seasons” and only sample a small time window. With only 45% of dives having observed sharks, there is a good chance scientists would get biased or inaccurate results.
These trends could also be quite interesting and important for tourism. Trends could potentially be used to prioritize tourism opportunities to, for example, increase chances of diving with sharks, working through a diver’s bucket list, and to optimizing socio-economic values.
Trends through time.
Four years isn’t really a long enough time, typically, to document trends in species that have slow life history characteristics. So, we didn’t expect to find trends.
Although that was generally true, we did find a few patterns.
One exception was particularly surprising.
Whitetip Reef Sharks, the most commonly encountered shark species, significantly increased at nearly all western sites (blue dots) and decreased on eastern sites (red dots). We don’t yet have a reasonable explanation for these trends. Photo Credit: Amanda Cotton / Ocean Image Bank, Map Credit: Ward-Paige et al. 2022.
Over this relatively short period of time (4 years), the most commonly encountered species, Whitetip Reef Shark (Triaenodon obesus), significantly increased at nearly all western sites and significantly decreased on all eastern sites. (See map inset – blue dots are significant increases and red dots are significant decreases.
These trends cannot be explained by systematic sampling changes, such as divers getting better/worse at finding Whitetip Reef Sharks because it would have had to happen at each site, with opposite effects at every site on the west and east. There is no evidence for this.
This species does move tens of kilometers, but it is unlikely to have moved the hundreds of kilometers needed to depopulate the eastern sites and repopulate the western sites.
It’s very curious.
What could explain these trends?
We don’t know, but hope these results spark further discussion and investigation.
Relevance to sharks in Fiji and beyond.
Generally, this study highlights the capacity of stakeholders to document their ocean and the importance of supporting broadscale, longitudinal, participatory science methodologies that unite communities to track the dimensions of the ocean they value.
Blacktip Reef Shark (Carcharhinus melanopterus) – one of the three most commonly sighted sharks – in Fiji. Photo: Tom Vierus / Ocean Image Bank
This study should prompt future scientific research efforts in Fiji and beyond.
For example:
In Fiji, to guide future scientific questions about sharks, such as “What is driving the changes in Whitetip Reef Sharks across the country?”, “What are the threats to the hotspots of sharks?”, and “How are shark populations changing in response to protection, fishing, or tourism?”.
To move beyond sharks and Fiji, using the same methodologies to study sharks all year and throughout the Pacific or global ocean, expanding to other species (e.g., turtles, whales) and their threats (e.g., plastics, ghost gear).
To build understanding of the socioeconomic value of tourism through space and time, and to understand the influence of particular species, threats, policy successes, or conservation that drive socioeconomic value?
To guide marine spatial planning and the design of marine protected area networks, especially for rare and mobile species and tourism.
Scaling these methodologies: For any location, species, or interest group.
Importantly, the size and scale of this project illustrates the value of pursuing scientific projects that work for and with stakeholders and rightsholders.
The eOceans mobile app and platform automates the expertise of scientists to enable all ocean explorers to log what they see — any species or issue, anywhere in the world — and to automatically share and analyze those data in real-time to help make informed decisions. Photo: eOceans
At eOceans, we aim to listen carefully, to be empathetic to local perspectives, and to help ask and answer questions that matter.
The GFSC was one such project.
But it was all manual – pencil on paper with manual entry and analysis – the same way marine research has been conducted since the 1950’s.
Just like eShark, eManta, the Global Shark Sanctuary Assessment, it was too expensive, time consuming, and slow to help with urgent conservation needs. Sharks, fisheries, plastic pollution, climate change, marine protected areas, invasive species, etc. are all changing fast, and doing manual science holds back discoveries and inhibits the possibility of timely actions.
We urgently needed automation.
Using the lessons learned through the GFSC, and other similar projects, eOceans spent the last 4 years building a mobile app and analytics platform to automate the GFSC – making it more accessible, affordable, engaging, empowering, and with quality checks and analysis performed in real-time, it allows for faster, dynamic, informed decision making.
eOceans app and platform works for tracking of all marine species (>200,000 species listed), and issues (e.g., pollution, spills, entanglements, diseases) from any activity, anywhere in the ocean.
Future Great Fiji Shark Counts can, and should be done in real-time.
Studying urgent ocean matters?
If your organization or community needs to track an ocean related issue anywhere in the world you can get your own project started and powered by eOceans at eOceans.app.
We’re on a mission to help communities, businesses, and organizations around the world get the scientific support they need to track and protect their ocean, livelihoods, and way of life on time-scales that keep pace with change.
For the ocean. For us.
Will we Bankrupt the Ocean with “Sustainability”?
A simple bank account analogy:
Imagine your bank account was depleted by 90%. You deploy strategies to slow your spend to avoid bankruptcy. These “Sustainability” activities help you to maintain your account for longer. But, because you have already committed to payments that keep drawing down your account, they can’t help you avoid bankruptcy forever. For that, you need to rebuild your account with “Regenerative” activities.
The ocean is like your bank account.
Regardless of how you look at it, misuse has depleted the ocean to a fraction of its health and value. To avoid collapse (bankruptcy), both “Sustainable” and “Regenerative” activities are urgently needed. Both suites of activities need to be measured, prioritised, and appropriately invested in to rebuild ocean health and wealth. To date, this has not happened because it’s hard. The eOceans platform has a variety of tools to measure, track, and prioritise activities that have the greatest positive impact for the ocean and the people that depend on it.
#sustainble #blueeconomy #regenerative #ocean #health #wealth
A simple bank account analogy
Imagine your bank account was depleted by 90%. You deploy strategies to slow your spend to avoid bankruptcy. These “Sustainability” activities help you to maintain your account for longer. But, because you have already committed to payments that keep drawing down your account, they can’t help you avoid bankruptcy forever. For that, you need to rebuild your account with “Regenerative” activities.
The ocean is like your bank account.
Regardless of how you look at it, misuse has depleted the ocean to a fraction of its health and value. To avoid collapse (bankruptcy), both “Sustainable” and “Regenerative” activities are urgently needed. Both suites of activities need to be measured, prioritised, and appropriately invested in to rebuild ocean health and wealth. To date, this has not happened because it’s hard. The eOceans platform has a variety of tools to measure, track, and prioritise activities – to focus on those with the greatest positive impact for the ocean and the people that depend on it.
The ocean is like your bank account. “Sustainability” activities help maintain your bank account (the ocean) for longer. But when the account is already depleted and is still haemorrhaging, “Regeneration” is needed to avoid bankruptcy. The ocean is depleted and still declining – it needs prudent activities that rebuild ocean health and wealth. Photo: eOceans 2022
Growing the Blue Economy
There is a push to grow the ocean economy, and “blue economy”, because the ocean is seen as a new frontier that holds immense resources to grow wealth, while also being indispensable for slowing the impacts of climate change, building food security, and providing novel medicines.
While it’s encouraging to observe this growing interest, especially because it’s drawing a diversity of new perspectives, skills, and organisations, there is need for caution and evaluation to prioritise activities that have the greatest positive impact for the ocean.
Sustainability in the Ocean
“Sustainability” claims to improve activities to the point where they can be maintained over long time periods, but the scale of the activity, improvements on the activity, and how far ocean health has been depleted will likely determine the time to tipping points or collapse (bankruptcy). Photo: Conversion of mangroves to commercial aquaculture ponds, India. Srikanth Mannepuri / Ocean Image Bank
The “Sustainable” or “Green” Economy looks for ways to improve activities to make them less harmful. The goal is to become “Sustainable”, where activities can be maintained at a certain level indefinitely.
In the ocean, “Sustainable” activities are often synonymous with “Blue Economy” activities, which can include:
modified fishing gear that lowers the chance of bycatch, including entangling whales
energy efficiency (e.g., vessel efficiency, wind farms, tidal energy, etc.)
plastic and ghost gear removal
sewage/wastewater treatment plants
noise/sonar reduction or displacement
reduced agricultural runoff
aquaculture with lower impact per calorie
some types of habitat restoration and artificial reefs
The majority of ocean innovations and investments focus on these types of activities.
Like the “Sustainable” activities in your bank account, if these activities work they should hurt less than their predecessors and, necessarily, slow the rate of decline. They are essential for gaining the value society wishes to take from the ocean on longer timescales.
They [can] hurt less, but they rarely reverse the damage that has been done.
Do we aspire to “Sustain” a depleted Ocean?
Over 500 years, Atlantic cod shaped the social, economic, and cultural landscape of Atlantic Canada, but systematic overharvesting and mismanagement of this species reduced populations to 1% of its initial population, and [likely] shifted the ecosystem and sociocultural landscape forever. Photo: Unsplash | Ricardo Resende
Regardless of how you look at it, ocean health and the ecosystem services our ocean provides have been significantly depleted. “Ocean Wealth” is estimated at $24 trillion, but is “dwindling fast” despite countless “Sustainability” measures. The majority of this decline occurred over the last century, due to misuse, mismanagement, miscommunication, and delayed action.
These decisions, including those being made today, have put in motion large scale changes that are still unfolding.
The Canadian cod collapse is one infamous example. On the east coast of Canada, where I live, the hyper-abundance of cod shaped the social, economic, and cultural landscape over 500 years. However, in a few short decades, systematic overharvesting of this species reduced it to 1% of its initial population, and [likely] shifted the ecosystem and sociocultural landscape forever.
There are countless other similar examples of loss (near bankruptcy) of ocean health and wealth, such as:
The systemic wide-spread overfishing of the world's coastal and continental shelf waters that costs $83 billion per year
Invasive species wreaking havoc on native ecosystems at a cost of $23 billion a year
Overfishing of sharks at a rate of 63 and 273 million per year has resulted in one-third of shark species being threatened with extinction and threatening multi-million dollar industries
Again, likening the ocean to your bank account, even though you’ve put “Sustainability” activities in place (e.g., modified fishing gear that reduces bycatch), you are still making unavoidable payments that continue to draw from your account (e.g., degraded ecosystems, acidification, invasive species). Tipping points and collapse (bankruptcy) remains on the horizon. Just like your bank account, there is an urgent need to restore ecosystem function, biodiversity, biomass, blue carbon, etc.
The need for Ocean Sustainability and Regeneration.
About 40% of humans live along coastlines and depend on the ocean to survive, but decisions made in the past have put in motion large scale changes that are still unfolding and threatening the values that current society depends on. Male, Maldives Credit: Ishan Hassan / Ocean Image Bank
The ocean covers 71% of our planet and holds 97% of the water – water is the important buffer against climate change, essential for maintaining high levels of biodiversity that are crucial for life to prosper, and is a necessary source of oxygen and sustenance for our rapidly growing population.
Getting both “Sustainability” and “Regeneration” right – where ocean health and wealth are rebuilt to compensate for past decisions – is one of the most important challenges to overcome this decade.
Does this potential for bankruptcy expand to land?
Absolutely!
By all accounts, land is nearing bankruptcy (tipping points/collapse) like the sea. Everything from megafauna (e.g., wolves, rhinoceros) to birds, pollinators, and amphibians are depleted. Land ecosystems continue to be degraded, fragmented, and paved, which limits their regeneration potential.
Many countries are pushing programs to convert to more “Sustainable” options – such as lower/different energy sources like zero emission vehicles, solar panels, heat pumps, etc.
All of these still deplete the account, just at a slower rate.
Ecosystems also need to be protected and restored with “Regenerative” activities to avoid bankruptcy.
Need to prioritise activities
Some “Sustainability” and “Regeneration” activities are well researched and clearly provide incremental improvements. Many projects, however, lack research, expertise, and measurement, and are green-washed (or blue-washed in the ocean space) by audacious pitches and marketing. In my expert opinion, many “Sustainability” and “Regenerative” projects in use today are likely doing more harm than good.
Just like your bank account, it’s important to figure out which ones are justified and to focus on those that have the greatest positive impact, and to discontinue those that don’t.
Call-to-action: measure activities
At eOceans, we have, and continue to build, a suite of digital tools and expert-developed analytics to help governments, organisations, communities, businesses, investors, and incubators track and evaluate the impact of their “Sustainability” and “Regeneration” activities.
Our goal is to help others make informed, science-based, transparent, and calculated decisions.
The eOceans Platform-as-a-Service supports any interest group to track any species, issue, activity, environmental condition at any spatial scale, in real-time.
eOceans captures and analyses multifaceted social, anthropogenic, environmental, biological, and physicochemical data at the spatial scale of interest in real-time. It can be used to calculate, track, and prioritise different Sustainability and Regeneration projects to focus efforts that rebuild ocean health and wealth. Credit: Mark Fitz / Ocean Image Bank
For example, our MPA Health Tracker™, helps evaluate the success of marine protected areas (MPAs), and other marine spatial planning strategies. Do MPAs protect or restore species and ecosystems, and provide social, economic, and cultural opportunities? Could they be improved by redefining the boundaries or permitted/excluded activities?
Our Smart Fishery Tracker™ (coming soon!) helps fishers, fisheries, managers, buyers, and decision makers have the data, analysis, and insights they need to understand their stocks and ecosystems, enabling dynamic management strategies that adapt to change. Can fishing effort be moved to optimise catch and reduce bycatch? Does fishing effort avoid endangered species?
Focus efforts on activities with the greatest return
To avoid tipping points and collapse (bankruptcy), a diversity of both “Sustainability” and “Regenerative” projects are needed. All should be measured to evaluate their impact on the ocean and each should be prioritised to focus on those that have the greatest positive impact on ocean health and wealth.
For the ocean. For us.
Want to collect good data for your projects? Slow and quiet (usually) wins
Moving slowly and quietly typically helps us, ocean explorers, see more detail and capture better data for the projects we support in the eOceans platform. Some projects, like tracking ghost nets, dogs, or golf balls, aren’t as finicky as, say, tracking seahorses. So it really depends on the goals and objectives of the project that you’re helping. The key to providing good data is to pay attention to the necessary details.
Moving slowly and quietly in our ocean and aquatic spaces can improve our ability to find and detect species and issues, and help us collect better data. Photo credit: Sebastian Pena Lambarri
Contribute good data.
We all want to contribute good data to the projects we’ve joined in the eOceans platform.
But, how do we collect ‘good data’?
A teaching moment.
I used to teach third-year “Field Methods in Fish Ecology”. Unbelievably, it was the students first fish course in a four-year marine biology program. They were excited.
Students first Underwater Visual Censuses — deploying stationary point count, roving diver, and two belt-transects, instantaneous and non-instantaneous — to understand how each can be used to describe fish populations. Photo credit: Christine Ward-Paige
On the first two days of the course, we covered animal ethics, statistics, data needs, why sample, etc. We also introduced the four most common Underwater Visual Census techniques — stationary point count, roving diver, non-instantaneous belt-transect, and instantaneous belt-transect. These methods have been used since the 1950’s by scientists to count fish in the field — it’s a way of sampling without catching the fish.
The students practiced the methods on land before heading to the water.
On the third day, we went to their first lake for sampling. They suited up in thick wetsuits to perform their first Underwater Visual Censuses (UVC)— running surveys down the lake while counting and recording the fish they saw.
It was a mess.
Each year, on the first dive, the students were noisy, clumsy, measuring tapes billowing along the surface, standing on the bottom, and yelling back and forth to each other.
At lunch, they’d come to the dock and declare "There are no fish!".
Two years in a row, minutes after the students flopped on the dock in a heap of frustration, a large truck backed up and dumped 20,000 fish into the lake — it's a stocked lake!
The students looked at each other and laughed — "Are you sure there are no fish?".
On the next dive, they went in much slower and quieter, careful not to disturb the bottom — you could hear a pin drop.
Not only did they observe thousands of fish of many different species, but they also found that, along the length of the shoreline in just 3-10 feet of water depth, there were dozens of fish nests that they had completely overlooked on their first dive.
When the recreational fishers showed up a few minutes after the truck left — to fish what had been dropped off — and a dog started jumping through the lake after a ball, right through the fish nests, it was clear that these ‘ minds had been opened to what was hidden below the surface. What was in plain sight — they just needed to see it.
Happy dogs cooling off without a care of what lives below the surface. Photo credit: Jeremy Perkins.
Lesson learned.
The students learned many lessons in that moment. Not only did they need to be much slower and quieter to see the fish and observe their nesting behaviour, they quickly learned how humans — including themselves, but also the dogs and fishers — could impact their observations and the data they collected.
Contribute good data.
If you’re contributing to a project that needs precise counts of certain species, slow and quiet almost always wins. If you’re trying to see the impact of your own behaviour, or that of dogs or others, it may not matter as much.
To see as much as you can and to capture as complete a picture as possible in the eOceans app, it's best to be cautious and pay as close attention to detail as possible.
🦈🐋🦀🐙🐬🐠🐟🦦🦭🦑🦞🦐🐡
Even trained professionals performing field sampling techniques will first notice the fast moving, large animals and items — birds, seals, whales, boats. But, when we slow down and explicitly pay attention to detail, we see small, camouflaged animals — seahorses, barnacles, sand dollars, rockfish, and more.
Slowing down helps us to see better, but also helps wildlife be more comfortable to be seen.
Some animals, like pygmy seahorses, require extremely careful observers to detect them. Photo credit: Dorothea OLDANI
Depends on the goals & objectives.
Good data, does depend on the goals and objectives of the project.
A study on seahorses, epaulette sharks, or sand dollars will require you to slow down and look carefully, allowing animals to become more accustomed to your presence. It might even require some image priming — once you see one, it becomes much easier to see more.
If you are helping to find beached whales or bold basking sharks, you might need different tactics — covering more area and looking further off in the distance, for example.
Finding plastic pollution, ghost nets, oil spills, etc. may require additional sampling strategies to ensure you are paying attention and not looking past items that may be right in front of you.
Keeping the projects that you support with your observations in mind will help you to provide the data the project needs.
What will you see and log in the eOceans app today? How will that be different tomorrow, or next year? How is that different from the person that follows you?
Log observations in the eOceans mobile app to find out.
Further reading to get started:
All Hands on Deck: Now is the Time to Set the Path Towards a Thriving Blue Economy
Rapid and radical redistribution and democratization of ocean knowledge and science resources can grow the blue economy while saving ocean health and lives. The COVID-19 pandemic is the perfect opportunity to finally create this path that we desperately need. All hands are needed on deck to make this happen.
Rapid and radical redistribution and democratization of ocean knowledge and science resources can grow the blue economy while saving ocean health and lives. The COVID-19 pandemic is the perfect opportunity to finally create this path that we desperately need. All hands are needed on deck to make this happen.
Skipper, Pedro from Zavora Lodge, has been taking tourists and researchers out for over 10 years, providing an experience of a lifetime with whales, sharks, turtles, and manta rays. (credit: Marine Action Research, July 2019)
This year, billions will be spent on ocean science and conservation — budgets were set before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold.
With travel restrictions for the foreseeable future, scientists are distressed by the lost field seasons — a break in longitudinal data is significant, especially when the ocean is rapidly changing. In reaction, researchers are calling for more investment in remote science operations, such as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and satellite surveillance to collect ocean data.
But, more remote science is not what we need right now.
We already know the ocean is rapidly changing due to climate change, loss of biodiversity and biomass, and increased pollution — leaving communities and businesses vulnerable.
What we desperately need now is the widespread distribution of resources and expertise. We need to break down silos and speed up discoveries. We need literacy and acceptance of ocean science with results being accessible to those afflicted by ocean change. We need to arm communities with the knowledge and resources to mitigate and adapt to change. We need dialogue, collaboration, and policies that are fair with cross-sector communities working together to share the ocean — their collective “commons”. We need novel systems that integrate science, experience, and indigenous wisdom while protecting people and promoting resilient and flourishing coastal communities.
Remote science can’t do any of this alone.
Right now, during this pandemic, there is an opportunity to reinvent the way that ocean science is done for the future. It needs bold ambition, and many will reject it, but innovating ocean science to make it more inclusive and collaborative is the most humane and rational way to save communities and the ocean while continuing to grow the Blue Economy.
In pre-covid days, guide and researcher Nakia Cullain, shares a moment with a manta ray while gathering important ecological data (credit: Marine Action Research, July 2017).
Impact of the shutdown on communities and the ocean
Today, 10 months into the global shutdown, millions of ocean-going vessels remain parked. Field guides, those who are the ocean explorers, educators, eyes on the sea, and experts of local ocean conditions, are homebound. These people have decades of legacy knowledge and know the ocean better than the back of their hands. They know their ocean far better than I, a trained marine scientist, will ever know their part of the ocean.
Consider the cost of tourism guides not going to sea for this extended period of time.
Before the pandemic, guides were visiting their sites daily, for decades. This shutdown is not just a lost field season or a few paychecks or jobs. The consequences of a diminished tourism industry and the absence of guides and tourists on the ocean extend farther than most comprehend.
Some scholars have commented, hypothesized, and published on how the marine environment will “finally get a break from people”; they’re calling it the “anthropause.” The global “Our Ocean in COVID-19” project, which I’m conducting alongside a consortium of other scientists, ocean-based businesses, and field observers, set out to study just that. The results have already been shocking.
In some countries, more than 90% of marine tourism companies have shut their doors. Many are unlikely to reopen.
Consider the weight of this.
In pre-COVID days, guide and researcher Nakia rescues a female manta ray from a gillnet. “She had a lot of damage, but she swam away gracefully, but not before circling back to say thank you!”. (credit: Marine Action Research. June 2018).
Loss of tourism is immense
In Mafia Island, Tanzania, this was the first generation to be employed and have access to higher education thanks to a unique tourism collaboration between Chole Mjini and The Tribes Foundation. This dream, and its associated benefits, will be delayed by decades.
Over the last couple decades, in this community and thousands of others like it, there was a well-intentioned shift from fishing to tourism — a live shark or coral reef was worth more than a dead one in both economic and ecological terms. But the mono-economy that ensued prevented the creation of a diversified economy, including sustainable fisheries.
Now, for the first time in decades, people are deploying bomb and cyanide fishing — blasting reefs to catch a meal or make a few dollars on the illegal market. Distant and foreign vessels are fishing hard inside protected areas while there are no tourists to deter these activities. Nets are draped across reefs, scars left in seagrass beds, and sensitive habitat is being destroyed to take vulnerable fish and other animals — it will take decades to centuries to heal.
In COVID days, survey effort has greatly diminished the possibilities of rescue — like this endangered green turtle caught in a gillnet. (credit: Marine Action Research. August 2020).
People don’t fly halfway around the world for a restaurant or hotel, they do that for an experience that includes seeing wildlife like in nature documentaries. Will they visit for what remains after the pandemic has passed?
Cascading benefits of economies that work with Nature
Ocean assets are valued at $24 trillion and provide the essential products and services that support the growing blue economy. These assets are under additional threat without proper monitoring and deterrents.
The opportunity for high knowledge production and conservation value in tourism is often overlooked. Tourism guides, the good ones, take tens of millions of people out to the ocean each year, introducing them to the ocean that they know better than anyone else.
They provide education and outreach opportunities, and experiences of a lifetime. They survey the ocean. They monitor the ocean. Their activities not only influence their customers, who carry their experiences with them forever and share them with their social networks, but they also provide wealth for their communities, knowledge to scientists, and they keep illegal and unsustainable fishing at bay. Their experiences can inform policy and management decisions.
The damage done today in marine and coastal communities, including inside MPAs, which provide “Hope Spots” for the future, are being damaged to a point where they may not serve their purpose.
In COVID days, fishing inside protected areas is commonplace in the absence of tourism. Pictured, a pregnant bull shark caught within the Bazaruto Archipelago National Park (credit: Nakia Cullain. August 2020).
There are cascading benefits of economies that work with Nature. We were, pre-covid and supported by the growing blue economy, in the process of shifting from short-term profits to long-term abundance. But, this can only continue if we act quickly enough and with a collective purpose to keep communities and essential ecosystem services alive.
An opportunity
I’m calling on my colleagues, businesses, governments, and philanthropic foundations to scrutinize how budgets are being spent and to pool and spread available financial resources and expertise to support ocean science, conservation, tourism, communities — and lives.
Researchers cannot travel to far off lands to collect data, but we can use our expertise to train willing and able guides to be field scientists, collect data, interpret trends, and co-develop knowledge and mitigation strategies.
This is an opportunity.
It’s an opportunity to finally have protocols and standards in sampling methodology, data, and metadata that people can understand and use; To make results and information accessible across language and literacy levels; To spread science and knowledge wealth while also financially helping out the guides who are dependent on and invested in the oceans for their lives and livelihoods.
We have the technology and tools to make this happen — universities and colleges are all training remotely now. It is possible. We have to find the will to make it happen.
I don’t have all the answers, but I do have suggestions: Researchers can partner with local or distant tourism businesses, focusing on those that have demonstrated interest in science and sustainability. Portions of marketing and research budgets can help get boats and guides back out to sea to collect data and lead restoration efforts. Students and early-career scientists can work with the data generated to accelerate careers, break silos, build collaboration networks, and disperse knowledge. Media companies and larger businesses could sponsor these projects to increase capacity and visibility. Influencers can join and share science-based messages. And, those already invested in remote science can supply training, equipment, employment, and data products to coastal communities that are in great need of information for sustainable development.
Personally, I have already donated more than thirty eOceans’ “Teams”, including socio-ecological analytics and reports, to early-career scientists in more than 25 countries to research the impact of the pandemic on the ocean and coastlines in their country. Thousands of more studies are needed to investigate and mitigate everything from the impacts of plastics, illegal fishing, munitions, and invasive species to the myriad of issues associated with climate change.
More than ever, we need all hands on deck to save the blue economy, oceans, and lives.
Together, we can end the “century of undersampling” that dismayed Walter Munk, while also improving lives, science and conservation capacity, and the ocean.
I’m ready to pull up my sleeves to make this happen and want to hear from you if you want to be part of creating this path that the world urgently needs.
In COVID days, guide and researcher Nakia Cullain, conducts research from shore — prohibiting underwater data and rescues. (credit: Marine Action Research. August 2020
Do MPAs make sense? The need for accountability for our multi-billion dollar investments.
Expanding the network of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) is an expensive and important challenge, but they also urgently need transparency, accountability, and real-time evaluation. eOceans’ MPA Health Tracker™ and MPA Health Score™ have been built specifically for this purpose.
Marine protected areas are growing but evaluations are out of date or non-existent (#30by30) and they need accountability if they are going to serve their purpose.
MPAs are being pushed to cover 30% of the world’s ocean by 2030 to the tune of $5–19 billion annually and creating 1 million jobs.
These areas are designed to protect the $24 trillion in ocean assets, support a rapidly growing $1.5 trillion ocean economy and restore ocean habitats, marine species, and social values that have been significantly degraded over the last century by expanding human developments and extractions (e.g., oxygen, coral reefs, kelp, mangroves)
Other than “area covered”, a LOT more information is needed to ensure these areas provide the service needed. Do they change human uses or threats and therefore allow for recovery, are they in remote and relatively pristine areas and therefore maintain what is there, or are they Paper Parks with little to no enforcement or change in human use? All these are important considerations when evaluating success.
MPAs are complex and dynamic — species, habitats, and human uses change, inside and outside, throughout time, and around the nearby and regional area.
There are also global forces influencing success. If an MPA is designed to protect a certain habitat or species and that species moves or dies because of climate change — think of a coral reef following a mass bleaching event in Australia or stony coral tissue loss disease in the Caribbean.
We built the MPA Health Tracker™ to collaborative and transparently track all Marine Protected Areas in the same way in real-time.
Success is also determined by community understanding and acceptance, how badly the area has been degraded and needs to ‘recover’, and many other ongoing changes like Marine Heat Waves.
We absolutely and urgently need to be incorporating all these social, biological, and oceanographic complexities in our MPA evaluations and these evaluations need to be in near real-time.
But, scientists are still writing down their observations, one at a time, and analyzing for one question at a time. It’s insanely slow — taking years to decades to understand a single issue. Therefore, most MPAs have never been evaluated and even the most well-funded MPAs are only evaluated every 5 to 10 years, and rarely do they include a social, economic, or cultural evaluation — their selling features.
Four years ago I set out to fix this problem. Over the last 4 years, I designed the software, hired a team of developers and scientists, and created the world’s first all-in-one collaboration tool for MPA monitoring and assessment — the MPA Health Tracker™ and MPA Health Score™. Finally, communities, fishers, managers, decision-makers, scientists, and explorers can affordably, transparently, and collaboratively track the social and ecological dimensions of their MPA in real-time.
We urgently need to work together, across all perspectives, interests, and borders to add accountability and transparency in the monitoring and assessment of MPAs — a multibillion-dollar investment that is designed to protect the ocean and us. Please, forward this to your local MPA representative to encourage them to get started today.
Over 18,000 Marine Protected Areas have been designated around the world, but few have ever been assessed to determine if they are performing across social, biological, and anthropogenic dimensions.