Acartia: a decentralized data cooperative for sharing animal occurrence data across the Salish Sea, from orcas to zooplankton

• Main Authors: Veirs, Scott, Palamar, Maria Baron, Byrne, Nick, Ince, Peter, Zetterlind, Virgil, Brooks, Alisa Lemire, Berta, Susan, Veirs, Val
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Western CEDAR 2022
• Subjects: Orca; Copepods
• Online Access: https://cedar.wwu.edu/ssec/2022ssec/allsessions/564

Acartia is a decentralized data cooperative for sharing marine animal locations within the Salish Sea. It is named for one of the smallest animals in Puget Sound -- microscopic copepods -- but was built to recover one of the biggest -- the endangered Southern Resident killer whales. A demonstration of the democratizing power of Web 3.0 tech, it is capable of aggregating real-time observations from a growing ecosystem of applications and sharing archived observations from decades of monitoring effort. The purpose of Acartia is to redistribute power amongst collaborators -- from casual observers to large scientific institutions. Through this technology we can increase accountability by tracking provenance, providing attribution to all sources, and protecting the data from censorship and manipulation. Lessons learned during a 2-year process of developing the working prototype (led by Resolve Conservation) inform how we recommend the cooperative process & governance could evolve as more data providers and users join. The cooperative itself was developed as open source code (led by Type Human) which is freely available on Github.com. Acartia began by leveraging public, open data from two community science projects -- Orca Network and Orcasound. We describe how these initial stakeholders use a suite of mobile apps and web applications (developed by Conserve.io) to georeference and moderate opportunistic observations by community scientists, and convey them to Acartia. We also demonstrate the initial capabilities of the cooperative, including a public API, .csv-based data up/down-loads, data visualizations, and initial analyses. Confirmed panel members (each associated with a 10 min talk): -- Susan Berta, Howard Garrett, Alisa Lemire Brooks, Orca Network -- Scott Veirs, Orcasound -- Maria Baron Palamar and Graise Lee Jenni, Resolve Conservation -- Virgil Zetterlind and Deanna Richburg, Conserve.io -- Nick Byrne, Peter Ince, Ali Alaydrus, TypeHuman