Ocean Data Stewardship 101: A primer by Intertidal Agency
The Case for Data Stewardship
Understanding and managing natural systems often requires integrating data from a wide variety of data types and sources, across many different partners in the public and private sectors. If you're a data collector, how can you maximize your data's value by designing for interoperability from the start? If you're building data platforms and products, how can you help your partners make their data easier to work with?
Whether your data is proprietary, sensitive, open, or somewhere in between, preparing it for reuse can benefit future you, as well as anyone you share data with. We call this proactive mindset data stewardship, and we think it’s essential to unlocking more data collaborations to address the global challenges ahead. Data stewardship actions can benefit everyone who works with nature data, whatever your organization or role. A healthy planet needs healthy data ecosystems, and healthy data ecosystems need data stewardship.
About the Program
Over the last four years, Intertidal Agency has consulted with businesses, government agencies, non-profits, and multi-sector partnerships to improve their ocean data governance and stewardship. In the spring of 2026, we launched our first ocean data stewardship training program based on the lessons from our work and best practices from other data trainings. Our first class of trainees came from eight different countries across sectors and ocean topics and gave our program glowing reviews. We've just released our lesson materials with a CC-BY license, and we want to share them with the nature tech community to hear your thoughts, learn how they could be applied in other fields, and improve them.
In this session we will:
Talk about the challenges and bright spots that prompted this program
Cover the essential elements of data stewardship
Walk through and demo our open materials
Where we’re planning to go next
This session is for:
Anyone struggling to make sense of piles of disconnected data
People who want to share data ethically and effectively, with proper licensing and credit
Companies trying to create frameworks and workflows to support data harmonization internally and with external partners
Funders and agencies looking to provide guidance for data standardization