Overview
What is the Ocean Health Index?
The Ocean Health Index (OHI) is a tailorable marine assessment framework to comprehensively and quantitatively evaluate ocean health.
The OHI measures progress towards a suite of key societal ‘goals’ representing the benefits and services people expect healthy oceans to provide. By analyzing these goals together and scoring them from 0-100, OHI assessments provide an integrated picture of the state of the ecosystem and can be communicated to a wide range of audiences.
Originally developed by an interdisciplinary team of scientists (Halpern et al., 2012, Nature), global assessments have been repeated every year since 2012 (Halpern et al., 2015, PLOS One; Halpern et al., 2017, PLOS One).
The OHI framework is standardized yet tailorable to different contexts and spatial scales. This is possible because the core framework of how goals are scored does not change while the goal models themselves are developed with local information and local decisions specific to the context.
Assessments using the OHI framework are facilitated by the OHI Toolbox that is used to calculate and visualize scores. The OHI Toolbox is a suite of collaborative, open-source tools and instruction that provides structure for data organization and storage, data processing and goal modeling. Like the framework, the Toolbox has two parts: the core engine behind calculating and visualizing scores, which is an R package called ohicore, and a tailored repository to organize, store, and share information and write goal model equations specific to the local context.
The Toolbox enables assessments to be transparent, reproducible through access to detailed methods and computational code, and repeatable with the ability to modify methods and computational code. The results are visualized in a Flower Plot for easy communication with a wide audience - each petal represents one goal and its length is with the score of the goal. To learn more about our open data science workflow, please see our publication.