Acartia: a decentralized data cooperative for sharing animal occurrence data across the Salish Sea, from orcas to zooplankton
Presentation Abstract
Acartia is a decentralized data cooperative for sharing marine animal locations within the Salish Sea. It is named for one of the smallest animals in Puget Sound -- microscopic copepods -- but was built to recover one of the biggest -- the endangered Southern Resident killer whales. A demonstration of the democratizing power of Web 3.0 tech, it is capable of aggregating real-time observations from a growing ecosystem of applications and sharing archived observations from decades of monitoring effort. The purpose of Acartia is to redistribute power amongst collaborators -- from casual observers to large scientific institutions. Through this technology we can increase accountability by tracking provenance, providing attribution to all sources, and protecting the data from censorship and manipulation. Lessons learned during a 2-year process of developing the working prototype (led by Resolve Conservation) inform how we recommend the cooperative process & governance could evolve as more data providers and users join. The cooperative itself was developed as open source code (led by Type Human) which is freely available on Github.com. Acartia began by leveraging public, open data from two community science projects -- Orca Network and Orcasound. We describe how these initial stakeholders use a suite of mobile apps and web applications (developed by Conserve.io) to georeference and moderate opportunistic observations by community scientists, and convey them to Acartia. We also demonstrate the initial capabilities of the cooperative, including a public API, .csv-based data up/down-loads, data visualizations, and initial analyses. Confirmed panel members (each associated with a 10 min talk): -- Susan Berta, Howard Garrett, Alisa Lemire Brooks, Orca Network -- Scott Veirs, Orcasound -- Maria Baron Palamar and Graise Lee Jenni, Resolve Conservation -- Virgil Zetterlind and Deanna Richburg, Conserve.io -- Nick Byrne, Peter Ince, Ali Alaydrus, TypeHuman
Session Title
Innovations and Emerging Science 3 (Panel)
Conference Track
SSE1: Science for the Future
Conference Name
Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference (2022 : Online)
Document Type
Event
SSEC Identifier
SSE-panels-479
Start Date
27-4-2022 1:30 PM
End Date
27-4-2022 3:00 PM
Type of Presentation
Oral
Genre/Form
conference proceedings; presentations (communicative events)
Subjects – Topical (LCSH)
Aquatic ecology; Aquatic animals--Biogeography--Salish Sea (B.C. and Wash.); Marine mammals--Biogeography--Salish Sea (B.C. and Wash.)
Geographic Coverage
Salish Sea (B.C. and Wash.)
Rights
Copying of this document in whole or in part is allowable only for scholarly purposes. It is understood, however, that any copying or publication of this document for commercial purposes, or for financial gain, shall not be allowed without the author's written permission.
Type
Text
Language
English
Format
application/pdf
Acartia: a decentralized data cooperative for sharing animal occurrence data across the Salish Sea, from orcas to zooplankton
Acartia is a decentralized data cooperative for sharing marine animal locations within the Salish Sea. It is named for one of the smallest animals in Puget Sound -- microscopic copepods -- but was built to recover one of the biggest -- the endangered Southern Resident killer whales. A demonstration of the democratizing power of Web 3.0 tech, it is capable of aggregating real-time observations from a growing ecosystem of applications and sharing archived observations from decades of monitoring effort. The purpose of Acartia is to redistribute power amongst collaborators -- from casual observers to large scientific institutions. Through this technology we can increase accountability by tracking provenance, providing attribution to all sources, and protecting the data from censorship and manipulation. Lessons learned during a 2-year process of developing the working prototype (led by Resolve Conservation) inform how we recommend the cooperative process & governance could evolve as more data providers and users join. The cooperative itself was developed as open source code (led by Type Human) which is freely available on Github.com. Acartia began by leveraging public, open data from two community science projects -- Orca Network and Orcasound. We describe how these initial stakeholders use a suite of mobile apps and web applications (developed by Conserve.io) to georeference and moderate opportunistic observations by community scientists, and convey them to Acartia. We also demonstrate the initial capabilities of the cooperative, including a public API, .csv-based data up/down-loads, data visualizations, and initial analyses. Confirmed panel members (each associated with a 10 min talk): -- Susan Berta, Howard Garrett, Alisa Lemire Brooks, Orca Network -- Scott Veirs, Orcasound -- Maria Baron Palamar and Graise Lee Jenni, Resolve Conservation -- Virgil Zetterlind and Deanna Richburg, Conserve.io -- Nick Byrne, Peter Ince, Ali Alaydrus, TypeHuman
