Operationalizing
Better science in less time:
Lessons from the Ocean Health Index
Julia Stewart Lowndes, PhD and the OHI team
Openscapes Director, Marine Data Scientist, Senior Fellow
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
University of California at Santa Barbara
lowndes@nceas.ucsb.edu; @juliesquid
slides: openscapes.org/media. CC-BY 4.0
Artwork by Allison Horst for Openscapes
This is a story about...
The Ocean Health Index
A scientific assessment method, tool, and community for channeling the best available scientific information into marine policy.
Upgrading was possible because of open data science: the tooling and people enabling reproducible, transparent, and inclusive practices for data analysis
OHI’s entryway to open science was through data science
Because our team struggled to efficiently build from our own work
It’s enabled us to efficiently lead annual assessments globally (2012-2020+) & smaller scales (Northeast, BC), and support 20+ independent groups (OHI+)
Open data science is like the Force
More powerful than you ever imagined, broadens the scope of challenges you can tackle
Open science requires teamwork
Inclusive teams with diverse backgrounds can powerfully leverage open data science
Tooling
tools & practices
People
teams & community
Open data science
Our path to better science in less time using open data science tools
How we work
Tooling
tools & practices
People
teams & community
Tooling
tools & practices
People
teams & community
Open data science
This fuels reproducibility, collaboration, & communication...
Reproducibility
Our path to better science in less time using open data science tools
Tidy data has the same structure...
...so you can use existing tools in familiar ways...
...rather than hand-crafting one-time approaches that are hard to iterate, share, or reuse
Collaboration
Our path to better science in less time using open data science tools
Seaside Chats (regular analysis-centered meetings)
Communication
Our path to better science in less time using open data science tools
RMarkdown fuels new open science communication channels with R
RMarkdown files combine code & text
Renders to Word, PDFs, and the web
RMarkdown file renders to:
Word!
PDF!
Learn more:
Data science as an entryway to open publishing
jules32.github.io/rmarkdown-website-tutorial
web!
Tooling
tools & practices
People
teams & community
Open data science
fuels reproducibility, collaboration, & communication
?
Designed to onboard teams to open science through open data science
We empower teams to work in ways that are more efficient, resilient, & inclusive
Part of a larger effort to welcome scientists & grow the open movement
OPENSCAPES CHAMPIONS
An open data science mentorship program for science teams.
“If you want to learn to write, you read a lot,
if you want to play music, you listen a lot.
It’s hard to do this with data analysis.”
- Hilary Parker & Roger Peng
Julia Stewart Lowndes, PhD
http://jules32.github.io
lowndes@nceas.ucsb.edu
@juliesquid
openscapes.org ohi-science.org
@openscapes @ohi-science
slides: openscapes.org/media
This is a story about...
Artwork by Allison Horst for Openscapes
Thank You
Further reading (incomplete list):
Shiny enables interactivity for stakeholder engagement & co-creation with R