Data Mobilization Through the International Year of the Salmon Ocean Observing System

Abstract

Data mobilization—the process of making data available for appropriate re-use—remains a key barrier in effective salmon management. Data mobilization facilitates data sharing, discovery and reuse, and leads to increased citations, synthesis data products, meta-analyses and robust management-decision support-tools. The International Year of the Salmon High Seas (IYS) Expeditions in 2019, 2020, and 2022 presented a challenge and opportunity for data mobilization efforts due to the scale, volume, diversity of data, and number of nations involved. Here we demonstrate how we mobilized this salmon ocean ecology data—given the international scope of the project—through a natural alignment to the United Nations’ Global Ocean Observing System and Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. Under this framework datasets were catalogued using metadata records, assigned digital object identifiers, and published to a web accessible data catalogue (https://iys.hakai.org). Where possible, pre-existing community-developed and international data and metadata standards were adopted and data were also published in global open-access repositories. Both the sociocultural and technical solutions implemented deepen the impact of the IYS and lay a foundation and clear path forward for salmon and oceanographic data producing institutions, commissions, foundations, or projects interested in contributing to international data-intensive salmon and oceanographic sciences.