Volunteer Assisted Ocean Discovery League in GIS Data Visualization

The Ocean Discovery League is a non-profit organization that aims to remove barriers to exploration of the deep sea through the development of AI-driven data analysis, low-cost deep sea technologies, and capacity building with historically excluded communities. By creating a suite of low-cost, distributed tools, and supporting a community of explorers around the globe, they would make significantly more progress in understanding our planet than ever before.

Ocean Discovery League requested the help of a GISCorps volunteer to map their Global Deep-Sea Capacity Assessment data to the geographic regions where they were gathered, and bring this data into a web experience in the organization’s ArcGIS Online environment. Ocean Discovery League desired to use a combination of ArcGIS StoryMaps, Dashboards, Experience Builder, Web maps and Apps, and Insights to visualize, tell the story of, and allow visitors to interact with their data. Ocean Discovery League also requested thorough training and documentation of the processes and usage of their ArcGIS Online tools, as well as instruction on how to maintain them. Joanna Maurer, a GISCorps volunteer from Pennsylvania, was selected to assist Ocean Discovery League in building their GIS data environment and visualizing the data that they have gathered, as well as documenting necessary workflows for the continued use of their GIS environment.

Scientists are often challenged to communicate results of scientific research in ways that create authentic dialogues with non-scientific partners. One of the effective principles to communicate with local communities and to engage the public in decision making is to ‘tell a human story’. The pilot study was performed to quantify viewer engagement with a preliminary ArcGIS Online dashboard that was created to provide meaningful visualizations of results from the Ocean Discovery League (ODL)’s 2022 Global Deep-Sea Capacity Assessment (GDSCA). Exploring our oceans is crucial to understanding the world around us. Today deep-sea exploration is exclusive and expensive. Gaps in deep-sea research capacity and access to tools, technologies, education, and training perpetuates the notion that the ocean is here to be colonized and exploited by few rather than explored, documented, and cherished by many.

An ArcGIS Dashboard was deployed to provide meaningful visualizations of results from the Ocean Discovery League’s 2022 Global Deep-Sea Capacity Assessment (GDSCA). This new dashboard will allow the Ocean Discovery League to make technical information accessible and relevant to public audiences and stakeholders, raise awareness to deep-sea research gaps worldwide, and engage the non-technical audiences with empirical data and processes in a powerful way.

Project complete.