The single biggest motivation of the Ocean Health Index project is to use science to inform marine management. And not just any science, the best available science, data, methods, and tools. Open data science is helping us get there, with transparency, reproducibility, collaboration, and communication at its core.

The Ocean Health Index (OHI) has been changing conversations about ocean management. The OHI framework helps focus the discussions about benefits that the ocean provides to people in a particular area; it helps keep management targets in mind when considering which information could be included in an OHI assessment.

Today, OHI’s Dr. Ben Halpern led a live ‘Ask Me Anything’ question and answer session on Reddit hosted by PLOS ONE.

We have a Perspective published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution that we’re really excited about! It’s not a typical research manuscript; we took a step back and wrote about how we have been working as we’ve developed the Ocean Health Index program over the past four years, and we realized that it’s a really powerful story to share.

More news from the OHI team — we have been busy!

We are excited to have a paper published in PLOS ONE today: “Aligning marine species range data to better serve science and conservation”. In it we examine global maps of nearly 25,000 marine species ranges that are available publicly from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and AquaMaps. You can read the paper here, or check out our interactive web application where you can explore our results and compare range maps of more than 250 different species.