Exploring for conservation: opportunistic crowd-sourced observations and insights matter

Around the world, ocean explorers are increasingly making their personal observations and insights available to researchers and organizations with the intention of contributing to science and conservation. The opportunities... [ view full abstract ]

Around the world, ocean explorers are increasingly making their personal observations and insights available to researchers and organizations with the intention of contributing to science and conservation. The opportunities for these data are immense. For example, individual observations from daily experiences (opportunistic rather than from standardized sampling), can inform on various natural, social, and political science questions because the data reflect human use patterns in addition to ecological patterns. Here, I present a summary of some of the most significant findings revealed, so far, by the > 1.9 million opportunistic dives reported to the eOceans databases from >90 regions of the world. These findings include the global distribution and human use patterns of manta rays and sharks, evaluations of various marine conservation policies, the temporal and spatial distribution of sharks, rays, and turtles in Thailand and Fiji, and other snapshots of marine animals, and human explorers. These findings have already had important outcomes for regional and international policies. Given the value of these data, I finish by outlining my vision of how we can move towards a more efficient platform where ocean explorers log and track what they see, while seamlessly contributing to various researchers and organizations.