The importance of open science for biological assessment of aquatic environments.

Open science principles that seek to improve science can effectively bridge the gap between researchers and environmental managers. However, widespread adoption has yet to gain traction for the development and application of bioassessment products. At the core of this philosophy is the concept that research should be reproducible and transparent, in addition to having long-term value through effective data preservation and sharing. In this article, we review core open science concepts that have recently been adopted in the ecological sciences and emphasize how adoption can benefit the field of bioassessment for both prescriptive condition assessments and proactive applications that inform environmental management. An example from the state of California demonstrates effective adoption of open science principles through data stewardship, reproducible research, and engagement of stakeholders with multimedia applications. We also discuss technical, sociocultural, and institutional challenges for adopting open science, including practical approaches for overcoming these hurdles in bioassessment applications.

Changes in ocean health in British Columbia from 2001 to 2016.

Effective management of marine systems requires quantitative tools that can assess the state of the marine social-ecological system and are responsive to management actions and pressures. We applied the Ocean Health Index (OHI) framework to retrospectively assess ocean health in British Columbia annually from 2001 to 2016 for eight goals that represent the values of British Columbia's coastal communities. We found overall ocean health improved over the study period, from 75 (out of 100) in 2001 to 83 in 2016, with scores for inhabited regions ranging from 68 (North Coast, 2002) to 87 (West Vancouver Island, 2011). Highest-scoring goals were Tourism & Recreation (average 94 over the period) and Habitat Services (100); lowest-scoring goals were Sense of Place (61) and Food Provision (64). Significant increases in scores over the time period occurred for Food Provision (+1.7 per year), Sense of Place (+1.4 per year), and Coastal Livelihoods (+0.6 per year), while Habitat Services (-0.01 per year) and Biodiversity (-0.09 per year) showed modest but statistically significant declines. From the results of our time-series analysis, we used the OHI framework to evaluate impacts of a range of management actions. Despite challenges in data availability, we found evidence for the ability of management to reduce pressures on several goals, suggesting the potential of OHI as a tool for assessing the effectiveness of marine resource management to improve ocean health. Our OHI assessment provides an important comprehensive evaluation of ocean health in British Columbia, and our open and transparent process highlights opportunities for improving accessibility of social and ecological data to inform future assessment and management of ocean health.

Drivers and implications of change in global ocean health over the past five years.

Growing international and national focus on quantitatively measuring and improving ocean health has increased the need for comprehensive, scientific, and repeated indicators to track progress towards achieving policy and societal goals. The Ocean Health Index (OHI) is one of the few indicators available for this purpose. Here we present results from five years of annual global assessment for 220 countries and territories, evaluating potential drivers and consequences of changes and presenting lessons learned about the challenges of using composite indicators to measure sustainability goals. Globally scores have shown little change, as would be expected. However, individual countries have seen notable increases or declines due in particular to improvements in the harvest and management of wild-caught fisheries, the creation of marine protected areas (MPAs), and decreases in natural product harvest. Rapid loss of sea ice and the consequent reduction of coastal protection from that sea ice was also responsible for declines in overall ocean health in many Arctic and sub-Arctic countries. The OHI performed reasonably well at predicting near-term future scores for many of the ten goals measured, but data gaps and limitations hindered these predictions for many other goals. Ultimately, all indicators face the substantial challenge of informing policy for progress toward broad goals and objectives with insufficient monitoring and assessment data. If countries and the global community hope to achieve and maintain healthy oceans, we will need to dedicate significant resources to measuring what we are trying to manage.

Incorporating public priorities in the Ocean Health Index: Canada as a case study.

The Ocean Health Index (OHI) is a framework to assess ocean health by considering many benefits (called 'goals') provided by the ocean provides to humans, such as food provision, tourism opportunities, and coastal protection. The OHI framework can be used to assess marine areas at global or regional scales, but how various OHI goals should be weighted to reflect priorities at those scales remains unclear. In this study, we adapted the framework in two ways for application to Canada as a case study. First, we customized the OHI goals to create a national Canadian Ocean Health Index (COHI). In particular, we altered the list of iconic species assessed, added methane clathrates and subsea permafrost as carbon storage habitats, and developed a new goal, 'Aboriginal Needs', to measure access of Aboriginal people to traditional marine hunting and fishing grounds. Second, we evaluated various goal weighting schemes based on preferences elicited from the general public in online surveys. We quantified these public preferences in three ways: using Likert scores, simple ranks from a best-worst choice experiment, and model coefficients from the analysis of elicited choice experiment. The latter provided the clearest statistical discrimination among goals, and we recommend their use because they can more accurately reflect both public opinion and the trade-offs faced by policy-makers. This initial iteration of the COHI can be used as a baseline against which future COHI scores can be compared, and could potentially be used as a management tool to prioritise actions on a national scale and predict public support for these actions given that the goal weights are based on public priorities.