OHI Go

Understanding your Ocean Health Index score

Have you ever wondered why your country got a certain score in the annual Ocean Health Index assessment or been interested in diving deeper into the data? OHI Go enables countries to interpret their OHI scores and identify ocean priorities directly from global assessments by leveraging over seven years of data, models, and expertise.

Unlike OHI+ assessments that require higher investment of funds, personnel, science, and data science expertise, OHI Go requires lower effort and technical capacity but allow groups to use the OHI framework and underlying data to inform decision-making at the national scale.

OHI Go is a multi-day hands-on workshop that focuses on:

1. Conceptual understanding of ocean health

When beginning an OHI assessment, it is important to first start with a conceptual understanding of your system socially and ecologically and think about your country’s goals and targets for a healthy ocean. Through OHI Go, you will begin by deliberately considering the ten OHI goals, learning more about each one, and deciding if they are locally relevant. This helps decrease bias and the urge to exclude goals due to lack of data.

2. Targeted data exploration

According to a 2014 New York Times article, “data scientists spend 50 to 80 percent of their time mired in the mundane labor of collecting and preparing data, before it can be explored for useful information.” OHI Go eliminates this step by featuring data from OHI global assessments, which has already been wrangled, processed, and presented in an interactive way.

The targeted data exploration focuses on the “what” of the data: what data is currently powering your country’s score and what percentage of it is estimated (“gap-filled”) due to lack of available data to global databases. This allows your team to examine a suite of ocean indicators and identify possibilities to reflect local needs in your OHI. Depending on the size of your country and the percent of data that are directly reported by your country (i.e. not estimated by gap-filling), global scores may be a good enough representation for prioritizing ocean management.

3. Tangible outcomes

OHI Go results in a report identifying the underlying data and capturing the priorities and ideas discussed from the stakeholder, data-intensive workshop. It is a planning tool, jumpstarting the process of incorporating ocean data into ocean management. It enables your team to plan priorities based on available global scores or plan an OHI+ assessment based on more local information.

Explore a example workshop agenda, previously called “Country Opportunities”.