Ocean Data for Citizen Science (Dados do Oceano para Ciência Cidadã) - Our Blue Hands Project

Résumé

Background & Objective

As we face present and future challenges towards sustainability, a great amount of Ocean data is generated by multiple observatories worldwide to monitor the health and state of marine ecosystems. Currently, only a small portion of this data is used by society to generate information and knowledge to better understand the Ocean, and even less data is effectively applied to make nature-based decisions. If we want to improve this scenario, it is crucial to adopt best practices of Ocean data management, from field acquisition to information sharing to users. This course aims to provide introductory content on different aspects of Ocean data management as well as basic analytical tools for long-term marine conservation. The course is prepared to help both Ocean professionals (e.g. scientists, managers, conservationists, technicians) and citizens to work with the available ocean data and implement simple data pipelines at monitoring programs. It is a volunteer initiative of the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS, IOC-UNESCO; Brazil Node) in order to contribute to capacity development at regional scales ('Portuguese Language countries'), invited by the Our Blue Hands project as a counterpart of the UNDP Accelerator lab support.