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Research & Data

Through RWSC, federal agencies, states, industry, environmental nonprofits, and the research community work together to conduct coordinated research. To facilitate coordination among these sectors, many of which fund and/or require research, and the research community, RWSC maintains several tools and resources.

Recommendations for regional coordination, data management, standardization, and sharing by data type

The research community and state, federal, and industry funders of long-term/archival PAM in U.S. Atlantic waters have the common goal of detecting and characterizing broad-scale shifts in baleen whale detections throughout the region. RWSC convenes these groups to coordinate regional deployment, data management, and analysis of long-term/archival PAM. The RWSC Marine Mammal Subcommittee leads this work.

The RWSC, in collaboration with the Responsible Offshore Science Alliance (ROSA) and the Atlantic Cooperative Telemetry Network (ACT) is coordinating regional deployment, data management, and analysis of acoustic telemetry data in offshore wind energy areas. Within the RWSC, the Protected Fish Species Subcommittee and Sea Turtle Subcommittee lead this work.

The RWSC Data Policy specifically applies to work supported by RWSC research funding and is designed to help inform other policies, contracts, and agreements so that research can advance knowledge, be used in decision-making, and have wide utility to researchers, government agencies, and others. The Policy is available under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication so that anyone can repurpose and reuse its contents, in whole or in part.

A github repository that includes publicly available information about recommended language for research agreements and contracts to ensure interoperable data.

A useful reference for the terminology used by RWSC and partners to refer to data management and governance work.

Metadata describing every research and monitoring dataset collected are required to ensure that all data can be found, indexed, and accessed via a Data Catalog. These essential metadata are meant to apply across all research domains and subject areas, and for all research outputs related to offshore wildlife.

RWSC developed a data management plan template on DMPTool.org that is customized to capture critical information identified by the RWSC Subcommittees and that will generate a DMSP compliant with RWSC data management recommendations and requirements.

To facilitate coordinated research and analysis for wildlife and marine ecosystems, the Data Governance Subcommittee has been working with other taxa- and habitat-focused RWSC Subcommittees to identify and recommend long-term storage options for each type of data described in the Science Plan.