MEDIN have been tasked with finding out whether there is an underlying business case for providing an online database of marine monitoring undertaken by UK organisations. And, if there is, how this should function to meet the needs of the marine community.

We would like to invite you, as MEDIN Sponsors, Partners and stakeholders, to contribute to this discussion over the next couple of months. We aim to establish if there is a clear requirement in the community to have a central, online tool for finding out about UK marine monitoring activity. If there is, we aim to get a detailed steer from stakeholders of what this tool should be able to do to meet their needs.

Since 2008, MEDIN have supported and updated the UK Directory of Marine Observing Systems (UKDMOS), which is a tool for users to find out about the marine monitoring programmes that operate in the UK. Although a very detailed and useful tool, it has been criticised for not being kept up-to-date which is partly the result of there being no editing interface for owners of programmes to directly make updates themselves.

The first step of this discovery work is the completion of this questionnaire, the results of which will provide information to develop discussions and will influence the future of UKDMOS and whether MEDIN will continue to support it. 

The second step will be a series of 4 online discovery sessions, over a period of 2 months. Each of these will be two hours in length and will be conducted remotely to ensure that all relevant stakeholders have the opportunity to attend one. We will also conduct interviews to gather more details about individual user stories for marine monitoring data. 

Please complete this questionnaire and share this information with your colleagues so that we can gather initial community thoughts and opinions. We are particularly interested in hearing from people whose work involves regular monitoring of the marine environment in any way, including funders, decision makers, those who carry out monitoring and those who use information about monitoring. It should take approximately 15 minutes to complete.

If you’re willing to take part in the discovery sessions, please email enquiries@medin.org.uk to be added to the list. 

The online discovery sessions will take place on: 

Thursday February 6th 10:00-12:00

Wednesday February 26th 13:00-15:00

Monday March 3rd 10:00-12:00

Tuesday March 25th 10:00-12:00

Your input is gratefully received.