Chapter 1 Welcome

Hello! This book aims to help you get “on board” with Ocean Health Index (OHI) methods and practices as you lead your own independent OHI assessment (OHI+). It helps orient you to OHI training resources, with chapters organized in the same way as we introduce OHI+ assessments at http://ohi-science.org.

The OHI process has 4 steps: Learn, Plan, Conduct, and Inform. These steps are are overlapping and iterative: as you plan your assessment you will continue to learn, as you conduct your assessment you will need to modify your plan and keep team members and stakeholders informed. You’ll also find Appendix 1 provides details about the OHI Global Assessment, which is repeated annually each year with less time and resources because of the structure we have created.

1.1 Onboarding Roadmap

The OHI Onboarding Roadmap below outlines 15 hours of training — resources that you can asynchronously watch and read as self-paced learning as your time allows. Please visit each chapter in this book, which provides further details and resources.


OHI Onboarding Roadmap
Topic Action Minutes
Learn
Intro to OHI: Drivers & implications of change in global ocean health 45
Intro to OHI+: Transforming marine science for management 45
Best practices: Assessing ocean health using tailorable frameworks 60
Plan
Tailoring the OHI+ to the U.S. Northeast 45
Gathering and organizing data 60
Better science in less time 60
Conduct
Overview of the OHI+ workflow 10
What is the Toolbox? 30
Intro to open data science 270
Calculations: basic workflow 120
Calculations: advanced workflow 60
Uncertainty & gapfilling 20
Inform
OHI+ websites 60

1.2 Citation policy

Please see our citation policy to cite the Ocean Health Index and assessment resources.