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MEDIN Open Meeting 2025
Thursday 4th December 2025
Hybrid - Met Office, Fitzroy Rd, Exeter EX1 3PB and online using Microsoft Teams
The Marine Environmental Data and Information Network (MEDIN) invites the marine community, particularly those from a policy, commercial, academic and conservation background, to join an open meeting to highlight the progress of addressing marine data management challenges that has been made so far and to acknowledge and discuss the existing issues around data.
The MEDIN Open Meeting 2025 is free and open to anyone with an interest in marine data.
There will be a series of presentations and discussions around the marine data types we are making Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable (FAIR), the challenges we face in marine data management, how we are finding solutions and knowledge sharing.
Download the AGENDA.
The meeting will include the following sessions:
Session 1: Marine data types without a MEDIN Data Archive Centre
Samantha Garrard, Plymouth Marine Laboratory: Stakeholder perspectives and requirements for providing long-term access to marine social and economic data.
"There is a growing need for marine social and economic data to be accessible alongside environmental data. This is particularly evident in the development of the natural capital approach, which integrates environmental, social, and economic data to provide a comprehensive understanding of how ecosystems support human societies and economies. Alongside environmental data, social and economic data are crucial because they enable the integration of the value of natural resources and ecosystem services into decision-making processes.
While MEDIN remains the leading authority and coordinating body for UK marine environmental data, it has not yet extended its focus to actively support marine social and economic data streams. This gap is partly due to limited resources and a lack of strategic direction from funding bodies.
To address this, we conducted a Defra-funded consultation with key stakeholders in the marine social and economic domain to identify requirements for ensuring long-term access to these data. The consultation was structured around four key themes: 1) Improving data access and discovery, 2) Improving data storage and archival, 3) Improving data sharing and communication, and 4) Strategic action to improve access to marine social and economic data."
Harry Richardson, The Crown Estate: Confident Data-Driven Decisions: How can we make them?
"To utilise marine data in decision making, it must meet the Q-FAIR (Quality, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles. Data collected by or for offshore industry still faces challenges around quality and reusability. This presentation will explore how The Crown Estate continues to further the capability of our people and tools to support and enable confident data-driven decisions.
Transferability (or reusability) of industry data, along with the insights drawn from it, is particularly crucial. Without having confidence in the transferability of these data, their utility beyond the area of development or region is greatly diminished. At The Crown Estate, our remit means that our projects span several consenting regimes and differing environmental conditions. In order to understand how we can use our industry evidence base throughout the UK marine environment, we have recently led and funded a project evaluating the transferability of environmental data - allowing data from tidal projects to be used to support consenting of future tidal developments.
Another key issue relates to the confidence in the data we have. This confidence roots itself in the Q-FAIR principles and the acceptance of methods in which the data are collected. Having data follow clear standards of archiving and methodology allows a common stakeholder acceptance of the resulting evidence-base. Continued collaboration with MEDIN exemplifies this effort. Another example of how The Crown Estate is working towards this is the Subsea Soundscape Project, focusing on developing our understanding of underwater noise in the Celtic Sea, is an excellent example of this for a data type without a long term plan."
Harriet Allen, Shark Trust: Connecting the dots: highlighting the need for a centralised Basking Shark data directory to enhance data coordination
"Citizen science is a helpful tool for achieving long term and wide-reaching data collection. However, the number of submissions a project receives will be influenced by several factors, including, crucially, the level of participation. With multiple projects collecting their own data (such as citizen science sighting observations, surveys, or tracking data), it can be confusing for citizen scientists to know where best to report sightings. Additionally, on an international scale, it is useful to know which organisations hold relevant data for any global or large-scale analyses.
The Shark Trust’s Basking Shark Project encourages public submissions of sightings information relating to this species, but there are many other organisations that gather similar data or conduct their own surveys. Understanding who holds Basking Shark data (citizen science generated or otherwise), the quantity of data, the geographical and temporal range, and any access restrictions, helps to present a more informed image to researchers, policy makers, and other interested parties. With so many unconnected and disparate datasets, regional or temporal declines in sightings from one dataset could be wrongfully interpreted as a biological trend, rather than a by-product of changes to species distribution, social trends or project engagement.
Following a Basking Shark Forum in 2024, the Shark Trust proposed an online directory signposting towards known Basking Shark data holdings. This would allow people to know which datasets exist, where they might overlap, and the relevant data owners and restrictions. The Shark Trust has now developed this data directory and it was introduced at the International Conference on Basking Sharks, and launched at the European Elasmobranch Association conference.
Even simply knowing that a potentially complementary dataset exists will help to better inform any conclusions drawn from these datasets and help better inform research and conservation action."
Peter Evans, International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) Working Group, Joint Cetacean Data Programme (JCDP): Connecting the dots: How the JCDP is transforming cetacean data sharing
"The Joint Cetacean Data Programme (JCDP) is an international initiative addressing key marine data management challenges by standardising and centralising effort-based cetacean survey data. Through the development of a common data standard and an open-access portal hosted by the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) and driven by the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) with a stakeholder working group; the JCDP enables consistent data submission, quality assurance, and improved accessibility with the aim of making these data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR). This approach has successfully mobilised fragmented datasets, filling spatial and temporal gaps and supporting evidence-based conservation and policy. The JCDP model is transferable to other taxa and data types, offering a scalable solution to broader marine data management needs."
Session 2: Solutions for marine data management challenges
Margarita Lopez, UN Ocean Decade: Vision 2030: Global marine data management challenges and solutions in the UN Ocean Decade
"The UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development has a vision for 2030 of developing a comprehensive and inclusive digital representation of the ocean by 2030. This digital representation of the ocean will consist of a data discovery and access service, a global digital atlas of the ocean and a knowledge hub. The challenge here is to connect the many (over 500) Decade Actions (projects, programmes and contributions) to data infrastructure. In order to achieve this, the Decade Coordination Office for Ocean Data Sharing (DCO-ODS) has embarked on a programme of community building and using its community or practice to develop data sharing guidance and technical documentation at a global level.
In this presentation, DCO-ODS will describe the approaches taken to successfully create a global data sharing and data management community. We will introduce the outputs of this community in support of data management planning, citizen science data and socio-economic data. We will also explain the position this community takes in complementing the activity of national and other global data sharing initiatives in the context of the UN Ocean Decade."
Jak Jones, British Oceanographic Data Centre: Tackling the challenges of autonomous platform data management
"As the demand for autonomous ocean platforms increases, driven by technological advancements and the global push towards Net Zero, challenges have arisen in autonomous platform data management. These platforms, including Argo floats, gliders, and Autosub Long Range (ALR) vehicles, are increasingly vital for multidisciplinary research, especially in remote or seasonally inaccessible regions for traditional research vessels.
The British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC), part of Digital Science at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), addresses these challenges by delivering robust, year-round data management systems including handling near-real time and delayed mode data from both research and commercial missions.
This talk will explore the challenges faced in autonomous platform data management such as integrating new sensors onto new and existing platforms, maintaining metadata and working towards interoperability across global communities. It will also look at how BODC are working towards automating end-to-end workflows to be able to provide reliable 24/7 365 systems. Solutions include the use of controlled vocabularies from the NERC Vocabulary Server, implementation of a Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) database for sensor and platform registration, and the development of flexible data dissemination pathways. BODC’s approach ensures that data from UK-deployed autonomous platforms contribute to international infrastructures like the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS)."
Yingying Yan, Historic England: The Marine HER Service for England: Developing Solutions for Marine Heritage Data Management
"Managing England’s marine heritage presents long-standing challenges: fragmented data sources, inconsistent record formats, difficult integration with terrestrial datasets, and the need to balance public access with the protection of sensitive sites. Without dependable and up-to-date records, heritage risks being overlooked in planning and policy, particularly given the unprecedented scale of change now underway offshore.
James Ayliffe, British Oceanographic Data Centre: Citation solutions for data management
"Citations have been around for centuries. Data citation as we know it, with Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), has been around since 2009, and has become a useful tool in data management, promoting the sharing of data and access to data. Citation should offer traceability, transparency and credit whilst having a healthy tension between each component. Following the FAIR principles DOIs and citation are even more prevalent and relevant. We will present how citations have provided solutions to data management and continue to provide solutions to data management and the subsequent reuse of data through traceability, transparency and the attribution of credit."
Monica Hanley, British Oceanographic Data Centre: Back to Basics: Bringing New Technologies to Forgotten Systems
"Data centres and services underpin our knowledge of the ocean. Centres are under pressure to develop new technologies and interoperable infrastructures with the increase in autonomous systems, data volume, and advances in scientific processes. This causes a strain on data centres to ensure business as usual and keep up with evolving technologies. Improving how we do core tasks as well as automating tasks that don’t require human intervention frees up valuable time and resource for effort required to put into new systems.
The British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) has begun automating the routine tasks done by data managers, increasing our engagement with the science community and improving outdated technologies while making data more FAIR. We built an app that allows originators to load their files, input and validate key metadata, improving findability and interoperability of the data while also demonstrating the importance of metadata and the controlled vocabularies used by BODC. A data manager can then check over the submission and either edit, ask questions, or archive the data. Building on the success of the new workflow, it was expanded to seamlessly publish data and metadata with Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to support findability. The next step was reworking the entire complex ingestion process for discrete sample and timeseries data, with fully integrated metadata validation, visual screening, and additional controlled vocabularies. Metadata captured in a submission can be automatically carried through the entire ingestion workflow to allow information to be input once and used throughout BODC systems supporting reusability of data. The latest work has seen integration with data management plans for each project into our internal tracking systems which then flows into submissions and publications. It is important to step back and ensure the less glamorous, but no less important work to be prioritised in order to make room for new and emerging science. Investing resource into the optimisation of existing core services provides resilience in our workflows and ensures BODC can continue to provide a world class data service to the ocean science community."
Antony Firth, Historic England: MDE Heritage Accelerator: mobilising developer data to speed the delivery of clean offshore technologies
"The Marine Data Exchange (MDE) Heritage Accelerator project – part of the Crown Estate’s Offshore Wind Evidence and Change (OWEC) programme – is remobilising heritage information created by offshore development to improve both project-specific and strategic decision-making in support of offshore wind expansion. The project will significantly enhance heritage information in the Crown Estate’s MDE and integrate it with Historic England’s National Marine Heritage Record (NMHR). The project is providing solutions to the challenges presented by the enormous volume and latent value of developer data: solutions that may be relevant to other data themes.
During development, geophysical and geotechnical surveys are processed and interpreted for developers by heritage consultants. This mechanism creates huge amounts of heritage information, but it is often held in archives like the MDE as report pdfs for individual areas with bespoke methodologies. The detailed spatial data created by heritage assessments – GIS layers and supporting digital information – are not typically archived or accessible.
The project is retrospectively capturing this detailed heritage information in MDE and integrating it within NMHR, ensuring that it is FAIR and attuned to the needs of developers and regulators. By embedding improved practices developed by this project in conjunction with industry, MEDIN and the heritage sector, existing and future development-led data will be more readily reusable in the environmental assessment of specific projects and in spatial approaches such as Marine Spatial Prioritisation (MSPri), the Whole of Seabed approach, and the second generation of Marine Plans.
This presentation will introduce this major project – running from April 2025 to March 2027 – and share initial findings."
Registration for in person attendance will CLOSE on 21st November. Online registration will remain open until December 2nd. Please register your attendance here.
Spaces are limited, so please register to secure your seat! If you have any questions about the meeting, please email enquiries@medin.org.uk.
We hope to see you there!